This paper investigates the modalities and causal mechanisms behind the breakdown of Italy’s democratisation process between 1900 and 1924, treating it not as a sudden “collapse” but as a cumulative reconfiguration of competition, institutions, and expectations. It combines a longue durée horizon with close attention to the expansion of suffrage and to electoral-law changes as institutional “filters” that could stabilise or destabilise mass participation. A core long-run axis reconstructs the changing scale of representation in single-member districts from a politics of proximity (a few hundred effective voters) to a politics of reach, culminating in the 1913 watershed. In parallel, the paper explicitly integrates the non-elective Senate—appointed for life by the King—showing how its institutional “impermeability” shaped the language and sensibility of democracy and suffrage. Finally, using a scraped corpus of parliamentary sittings (1848–1943), it maps the evolving semantic fields of democracy and suffrage in both chambers across the long term.

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• História e Arqueologia - Humanidades