Massimiliano Cencelli, the former Christian Democracy official whose surname became synonymous with Italy's system of distributing political posts by factional weight, died Saturday in Rome at the age of 90.
Cencelli, born in Rome in 1936, joined the Christian Democracy party in 1954 and later served as secretary to Adolfo Sarti before collaborating with Nicola Mancino. The term "Manuale Cencelli" emerged as journalistic shorthand for the proportional allocation of government and party roles among factions, a practice traced to the party's 1967 Milan congress where Sarti's "pontieri" faction won roughly 12 percent of the vote.
In a 2003 interview with Avvenire, Cencelli explained the principle: party and government posts, he said, should be divided like shares in a corporate boardroom. He later ran for Rome's city council in 2001 on The Daisy list.