Despite the promise of a new "second republic" launched in the early 1990s, Italy remains the least well-governed country in Europe. Fifteen years ago, the politicians who supported the mafia and the mafia on both sides were supposed to have pushed them away from a new generation of crusaders reformers and judges.

However, in this new book, a team of eminent experts in Italy reveals little real progress. The badly needed reforms have stumbled on the bickering between the parties and their ego-centered leaders.

Left-right coalitions were guilty of obstructing the anti-corruption revolution. Much has not been done to improve the quality of public spending: infrastructure and education systems are still abnormal, and decades of cyclical cuts and deficit spending have left the economy structurally weak.

Politicians in Italy are not mere masters of training (the ability to reinvent themselves and present themselves to voters), but to classes, or "lay classes", and to introduce new policies and institutions without replacing those that preceded them. The result is a harmful mix of outdated and contradictory legislation, the product of bargaining on reform by the chronically weak governments of the veto system.

The result - immobilismo - is a system in which all parties, and the democratic government itself, lose their legitimacy consistently.

This book has been published as a special issue of Western European policy.