This paper (1) examines two areas of Italy, with very different political subcultures and production systems, with the aim of making a comparative analysis of the role of local government policies in stimulating growth processes over the thirty-year post war period. Historians now agree that the policies of Italian local governments were a major factor in the processes of economic growth and the spread of social services. They acted through a highly varied mix of policies, including regulatory processes (town planning, coordinated local programming, etc.), operations enabling institutions to provide the local environment with specific public goods (industrial estates, business services etc.) as well as redistribution policies (i.e. the setting up and spread of local welfare systems and local tax systems). This influential steering role of local administrations, marked in some cases by the gradual inception of specific institutional authoritativeness, was not distributed uniformly over the whole of Italy and there were significant asymmetries between areas. A comparative analysis is made of the "Emilia-Romagna model" of local government, controlled by an Italian Communist hegemony in a context of small and medium sized firms, and the model of the city of Turin, which was based on an industrial Ford model because of the presence of the Fiat factory. The two models are compared from the perspective of actors and their different interests. Our aim is to gauge the nature and intensity of the local institutional actions that accompanied and promoted the processes of development.