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the corruption crisis, the Northern League worked to gain power at the national level, to
implement its demand for northern autonomy and, eventually, independence.
The first interaction between the government and the Northern League concerned
the creation of a new coalition in 1994 to replace the Christian Democratic-led coalition
government. The Northern League initially refused to support Silvio Berlusconi as prime
minister but eventually agreed to join the Forza Italia coalition government in exchange
for six cabinet positions (including the Interior and Regional Affairs seats) and a promise
to increase regional autonomy (Keesing’s 1994, 40021). In December 1994, the Northern
League withdrew its support from the coalition, forcing Berlusconi to resign. As the
government began to address some of the issues raised by the Northern League, such as
announcing discussions to reform the constitution along federal lines, the League
increased its demands from federalism to separatism, by announcing the Independent
Republic of Padania (Keesing’s 1996, 41104; Bohlen 1996; Keesing’s 1996, 41289-
41290). This radical platform, though, was not supported by the League’s members. As
the Northern League lost elections from 1997-1999, its influence dropped and its
Republic was never recognized. This crisis was resolved.
In this section, we explained our approach of using an analytic narrative built on
one case (Italy) to derive hypotheses regarding elite behavior that we will test in eleven
additional cases. We introduced the three crises that Italy experienced to see how the
actors bargained with each other to try to resolve the crises. The next section presents our
bargaining model.
Convention