Parametrizing Berlusconism

The Italian political scene in the last nearly 2 decades (1994-2012) was dominated by the Silvio Berlusconi’s experience. For the good and evil, these nearly 20 years were the years of berlusconism and counter-berlusconism. Berlusconism arose as a reaction to the post/ex-communists and their likely success after the collapse of the ruling system until then – the so-called consociativismo, a shared mode of power where the centre (DC = Democrazia Cristiana) governed the country with the consent of the left (PC = Partito Comunista) and of trade unions, and with the help of a collection of small conservative parties (the Partito Socialista of Bettino Craxi was a controversial exception in this scenario). In short, Berlusconism was a pro-market movement, anchored to a charismatic populism core, which fought, and often defeated, the near-social-democrat heirs of Communist Party.
If we use two simple quantitative parameters to proxy the size of the state and thus to evaluate the pro-market direction of this experience – the ratios of public debt and public revenues to Gdp, i.e the total amount of resources captured by central government – we easily find that Berlusconism has been a failure. Both public debt and taxes (central government gross indebtness and total revenue) as percent of Gdp significantly raised in Italy in the period 1994-2012, the years of Berlusconism. The increase was of about 4 % point for both debt and revenue.
(Data are our elaborations from Imf fiscal dataset)