Legislative Parties and the Repeal of Dictatorial Exclusion: Italy and Spain

• In Event: New Perspectives on Policymaking

Abstract

Why and how do democratic legislative parties repeal virulently, violently discriminatory measures pursued under dictatorship? How do the processes and outcomes of deliberations on anti-discrimination legislation vary across time in democracies, as interparty and intraparty competition shifts? This paper compares Italy and Spain to grapple with these questions. Under Italian Fascism, the 1938 “racial laws” lay the basis for the persecution, deportation, and murder of Italian Jews. In post-Fascist Italy, party elites retained the word “race” in the 1948 Republican Constitution and abrogated the 1938 laws in a piecemeal fashion. In post-Franco Spain, party elites first enacted the 1977 Amnesty Law, granting amnesty to both victims and perpetrators of repression during the civil war and dictatorship, whereas 2007 legislation entrenched the rights of the civil war’s victims and condemned Francoist repression. In broadest terms, this paper will illuminate the drivers and outcomes of efforts to advance the political inclusion of marginalized groups, a pressing question that commands attention and that nonetheless remains poorly understood.

Author

• Carol A. Mershon, University of Virginia