Eurispes: Exclusion Index – Summary (2025)
In the Italian Constitution, the fundamental rights of the individual are not confined to abstract declarations; rather, they require concrete material and structural conditions that make their effective exercise possible. The rights to work, education, health, social and cultural participation, equal treatment, and territorial equity form the pillars of a substantive democracy – one in which equality must be real, not merely formal.
Yet, the distance between the legal recognition of these rights and their actual implementation remains wide and often invisible when observed through partial or purely economic instruments. Italy in 2025 still exhibits deep territorial fractures in the realization of its constitutional rights. Seventy-seven years after the Constitution came into force, the promise of substantive equality remains largely unfulfilled, outlining a framework of an “unfinished democracy,” where “parallel Italies” coexist – characterized by differing opportunities, rights, and dignities.
It is from this awareness that Eurispes has decided to undertake a specific study focused on the creation and analysis of an Exclusion Index, conceived as a multidimensional tool to measure, at the regional level, the extent and ways in which constitutional rights are unfulfilled in citizens’ everyday lives. The chosen approach does not merely capture economic inequalities but seeks to map the multiple forms of marginalization that still today limit the full citizenship of millions of people – processes that represent structural outcomes of historical exclusion rather than temporary developmental delays.
