Silvio Berlusconi's PDL and Enrico Letta's PD may be the heirs to Christian Democracy and Marxist ideology, but asinmany other European democracies, centre-right and centre-left social democrat party policies now tend to converge.
Far from being the force for change envisioned by Samuel Huntington and other advocates of modernization theory, the middle class inmany young democracies is now actually acting as a brake on change.