Central bureaucracy and particracy in Italy: What role for political patronage?

This work aims to study the growth of Italian central bureaucracy in the years of Fordism «punto di rottura strutturale dei processi post-bellici di crescita in un gran numero di paesi, tra i quali l'Italia» (De Cecco e Pedone 1995). The main variable is the ministerial civil service; the objective is to measure the growth of this part of public service in Italy during the expansion cycle in Fordism, with an approach that allow to highlight the unphysiologic growth, due to the political patronage - compared with the development cycle of industrial democracies - in the time of substitution of traditional bureaucracy with new industrial and social bureaucracy. By studying this variable and several controls, as demography, parliamentary majority and GPD, we exclude that the growth has been physiologic, and provide several alternative hypotheses for this result.