ABSTRACT
There is a risk, in analyzing the Italian Socialist Party's (Partito socialista italiana or PSI) performance in the 1992 election, of interpreting the outcome through events which took place for the most part after the election—not before or during it. The dramatic scandals which swept through the political and business class following the April 1992 election certainly began in the Socialist Party, and they started just as the campaign itself was getting under way. The electoral damage inflicted on the Party, especially in the northern third of the country, by the revelations of corruption at the now infamous Pio Albergo Trivulzio geriatric home, and by the arrest of the home's Socialist administrator Mario Chiesa on February 17, just seven weeks before the vote, should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, the real catastrophe for the Party—the collapse of its vote and the forced resignation of its illustrious leader Bettino Craxi—unfolded slowly after April.
