Italian political history provides a rich opportunity for investigating the relationship between elites and democracy. For most of its 130 years as a nation-state, Italy has been beset with elite and mass conflicts, with a marked absence of a consolidated democratic regime. It has frequently been attributed to continuing elite disunity, not only by historians and political scientists, but also by contemporary actors. There have been repeated efforts to unify Italian elites, and the persistence of these efforts testifies to the difficulty of achieving (and preserving) a consensually unified national elite (Burton and Higley 1987) and a consolidated democracy. The Italian case thus is a chance to discuss specific requirements for elite unification and democratic consolidation. The questions that we shall ask are What attempts at elite unification took place over this long period? Why were those attempts unsuccessful, at least until fairly recently? Why has the creation of a consensually unified national elite in Italy been such a difficult and lengthy process? And finally, how valid is an overall interpretation of Italian political history that stresses elite disunity as the main source of regime instability?

Before attempting to answer these questions, or at least suggesting the direction in which answers may be found, some general observations are necessary. One is that although we can state now that the problem of elite disunity was never really solved until our own time, this does not mean that disunity was uniformly extreme throughout Italy's first century as a nation-state.