Massimiliano Cencelli, a functionary of the Christian Democracy party in the 1960s, has died in Rome at the age of 90. He was known for giving his name to the so-called Cencelli Manual, the term used to describe the criterion for distributing political and government positions among parties and factions in proportion to their weight.

Born in Rome on March 8, 1936, Cencelli spent his entire political career within the Christian Democracy party. The turning point that led to the creation of the method associated with his name came at the DC congress in Milan in 1967, when the pontieri faction was founded. Alongside Cencelli, its members included Sarti, Taviani, Gaspari, and Cossiga. The faction obtained approximately 12% of the vote and the question arose of how to distribute positions.

Cencelli proposed applying to politics a criterion similar to that of joint-stock companies, where seats on the board of directors are allocated based on shareholdings. According to Cencelli himself, in a 2003 interview with Avvenire, the idea was that party and government positions should be divided based on membership numbers, meaning the actual weight of each faction. This principle led to the following assignments: Taviani kept the Interior ministry, Gaspari became undersecretary at the Post Office, Cossiga went to Defense, and Sarti to Tourism and Entertainment.

The so-called manual was not in fact an official document, but a few-page typescript containing the criteria for assigning scores to positions and weights to factions. Cencelli maintained that his system served to guarantee recognition for minorities and to prevent the strongest faction from taking all the positions. The method became famous when Sarti, during government crises, would tell journalists to ask Cencelli.

Over time the expression became a permanent feature of Italian political language and entered university textbooks. The Treccani dictionary registered the neologism cencellismo, defining it as the tendency to distribute public offices based on the electoral weight of parties or factions. The term is still used today when ministries, presidencies, or other political responsibilities are assigned.

After leaving politics, Cencelli handled public relations for the San Raffaele Hospital. His name remained tied to Italian political history well beyond the role he actually held, to the point of becoming a reference for describing any distribution of positions based on the balance between political forces.