Trasformismo

[4] However, trasformismo fed into the debates that the Italian parliamentary system was weak and failing, and became associated with political corruption and was perceived as a sacrifice of principles and policies for short-term gain.

The system brought almost no advantages, as illiteracy remained the same in 1912 as before Unification, and backward economic policies and poor sanitary conditions continued to prevent the country's rural areas from improving.

The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci described trasformismo as a strategy to prevent the formation of an organized working-class movement by coopting and neutralizing its ideas and leaders within a ruling coalition.

Gramsci cited Giolitti's attempt to forge an alliance with the industrial workers of northern Italy under the banner of protectionism as one example of this method.

In the 1930s, Professor Frank H. Underhill of the University of Toronto also argued that Canada's two major political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, operated in similar ways by advancing the same policies appealing to the same variety of sectional/regional and class interests.