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Political parties share a very bad reputation in most European countries. This paper provides an interpretation of this sentiment, reconstructing the downfall of the esteem in which parties were held and their fall since the post-war years up to present. In particular, the paper focuses on the abandonment of the parties' founding ‘logic of appropriateness’ based, on the one hand, on the ethics for collective engagement in collective environments for collective aims and, on the other hand, on the full commitment of party officials. The abandonment of these two aspects has led to a crisis of legitimacy that mainstream parties have tried to counteract in ways that have proven ineffective, as membership still declines and confidence still languishes. Finally, the paper investigates whether the new challenger parties in France, Italy and Spain have introduced organizational and behavioural changes that could eventually reverse disaffection with the political partyper se.

This article investigates the dimension and evolution of the financing of political parties. It focuses on 28 parties in the five major European countries (Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain), analysing the parties’ budgets from 2002 to 2016. The article's assessment shows that the availability of funds increased until the beginning of the Great Recession (2008), and then decreased, mainly due to a decline in public support for parties. Diminished state generosity has led parties to look for different sources of financing: the article shows the proportion of self-funding resources in terms of membership fees and private donations that has sustained the parties’ finances. Finally the article presents a model that helps to explain the shrinking of parties’ income by including parties’ ideological alignment, electoral outcome, presence in government and share of public financing, and countries’ public spending and GDP level, to investigate the plausible causes of the reduction of parties’ income.

The article argues that the persistent high level of dissatisfaction vis-a-vis parties comes from a mismatch between public expectations and parties’ performances. The present lack of confidence in...

recensione al volume curato da Marco Lisi (ed) Party System Change, The European Crisis and the State of Democracy , Abingdon: Routledge, 2019, p. 338.

This article discusses the state of agony parties are experiencing today. In a nutshell, I argue that parties are now at pains to retain their linkages with society, and that the compensation they envisaged has further damaged them. To respond to sociocultural and economic changes which had weakened parties both in their organizational standing and in their public reputation, parties took a dual route: They went to the state to acquire financial resources and profit in other ways; and they introduced direct democracy practices inside the parties themselves. After discussing how parties have reacted to the changing environment, the article concentrates on intra-party organizational modifications and deals with three basic questions: (a) Why did parties attempt to democratize? (b) What outcome did the democratization, in terms of members’ direct intervention, produce? (c) Is democracy at stake because of the negative impact of the parties’ change and their consequent, persisting, crisis of legitimacy?

This article discusses Sartori’s party system typology and its eventual applicability to the Italian post-1994 party system. The first part of the article is devoted to an examination of the typology with particular reference to the case of the polarised pluralism which Sartori considered appropriate for the Italian party system until the late 1970s-early 1980s. In the discussion of the typology, particular attention has been attributed to the variable ‘ideology’, suggesting the relevance of the component ‘temperature’ which has been frequently mistreated compared to the other component, the more widely used ‘distance’. The final part of the article deals with a tentative assessment of the pertinence of polarised pluralism to the post-1994 Italian party system.

Cosa fa funzionare i partiti? Cosa consente loro di promuovere iniziative, elaborare progetti, reclutare sostenitori, organizzare il consenso, intrecciare relazioni, preparare manifestazioni, condurre campagne elettorali? A ben vedere sono i quadri intermedi, quei militanti e dirigenti locali che mantengono in vita e fanno funzionare l’organizzazione. Sono loro i muscoli che si flettono per far muovere il corpo del partito. Agli autori sembra di vedere che in un periodo di sfaldamento delle strutture organizzative e di atomizzazione della vita individuale, chiusa alla socialità faccia-a-faccia dalla pervasività della rete, la classe politica intermedia sia il solo attore che può iniettare dosi massicce di fiducia nella politica. Il loro attivismo, il loro impegno politico (non retribuito), la loro innervatura nella vita associativa e rappresentativa li rende produttori di capitale sociale, figure positive capaci di promuovere senso di appartenenza e responsabilità morale nei confronti degli altri.

Il saggio esamina la ricezione dei partiti politici nel corso del Novecento sottolineando il paradosso del passaggio da una loro piena accettazione come partiti (al plurale) alla loro massima esaltazione come partito ( al singolare) nell'era dei totalitarismi tra le due guerre.

This article presents an interpretation of the present malaise that afflicts the political party in established democracies. Today, parties are not only seen as inefficient or unscrupulous instruments, they are increasingly being labelled as illegitimate. The basic reason for this bad reputation lies in their detachment from society and their encroachment on the state. Parties tried to counteract the difficulties they faced in extracting resources from society (members, party identifiers, militants, money) by turning toward the state, which offered financial support, paid personnel, physical structures and patronage benefits. This shift reinvigorated the parties, which are now richer and more powerful, but it has further diminished citizens’ confidence in the parties themselves. In order to recover their dwindling legitimacy, parties have recently introduced changes, giving members more say in the decision-making process and in the selection of candidates and leaders. However, these innovations have not succeeded in revitalizing them, nor improved their image. Thus, parties continue to be unbalanced: powerful and yet distrusted. In this sense, they resemble a sort of mighty but unsteady Leviathan.

The book integrates philosophical, historical, and empirical analyses in order to highlight the profound roots of the limited legitimation of parties in contemporary society. Political parties’ long attempts to gain legitimacy are analysed from a philosophical–historical perspective pinpointing crucial passages in their theoretical and empirical acceptance. The book illustrates the process through which parties first emerged and then achieved full legitimacy in the early twentieth century. It shows how, paradoxically, their role became absolute in the totalitarian regimes of the interwar period when the party became hyper-powerful. In the post-war period, parties shifted from a golden age of positive reception and organizational development towards a more difficult relationship with society as it moved into post-industrialism. Parties were unable to master societal change and favoured the state to recover resources they were no longer able to extract from their constituencies. Parties have become richer and more powerful, but they have ‘paid’ for their pervasive presence in society and the state with a declining legitimacy. The party today is caught in a dramatic contradiction. It has become a sort of Leviathan with clay feet: very powerful thanks to the resources it gets from the state and to its control of societal and state spheres due to an extension of clientelistic and patronage practices; but very weak in terms of legitimacy and confidence in the eyes of the mass public. However, it is argued that there is still no alternative to the party, and some hypotheses to enhance party democracy are advanced.

Chapter 2 expands the analysis of the acceptance of parties by signalling the distinction between theoretical speculation and party politics ‘on the ground’. After the ideological and practical acceptance of parties in late eighteenth-century Britain, parties found their first operation on the ground in revolutionary France and the United States. Particular attention is devoted to the events of the French revolution where the Jacobin clubs set up, albeit for a very short period, the first ever nationwide, organized political party. In the nineteenth century the appearance of political parties was still regarded with suspicion and caution, and they were not yet fully endorsed even by liberal thinkers. The idea of partition and division was still held back by the advocacy of unity and uniformity. By the end of the nineteenth century parties had been ideologically tamed by the rise of the holist dominant value of the nation (France) and state (Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy).

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

Chapter 5 discusses the premises of the emergence of the cartel party with the parties’ resilience to any significant modification in the face of the cultural, societal, and political changes of the 1970s–1980s. Parties kept and even increased their hold on institutions and society. They adopted an entropic strategy to counteract challenges coming from a changing external environment. A new gulf with public opinion opened up, since parties demonstrated greater ease with state-centred activities for interest-management through collusive practices in the para-governmental sector, rather than with new social and political options. The emergence of two sets of alternatives, the greens and the populist extreme right, did not produce, in the short run, any impact on intra-party life. The chapter argues that the roots of cartelization reside mainly in the necessitated interpenetration with the state, rather than on inter-party collusion. This move has caught parties in a legitimacy trap.

Chapter 7 portrays the present challenges to political parties, and their response. The chapter surveys organizational innovations, such as primaries and internal referendums, recently introduced by political parties to counteract their decline in membership and loss of confidence amongst the electorate, and it questions their efficacy and validity. These pro-membership innovations seem in fact to favour a plebiscitary modality rather than effective democratic activity. The chapter suggests that an intra-democracy would need four ‘knights’ that should comprise: inclusion, deliberation, diffusion and pluralism. The alternatives to the party that have been advanced in recent times are considered, but their effective import is challenged. The chapter concludes by arguing for the unavoidability of partisanship for effective democracy. Even if the political party suffers agonizingly over its limited legitimacy, it still remains at the core of democratic politics.

Chapter 3 investigates the process of party formation in France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, and demonstrates the important role of cultural and societal premises for the development of political parties in the nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid in this context to the conditions in which the two mass parties, socialists and Christian democrats, were established. A larger set of Western European countries included in this analysis is thoroughly scrutinized. Despite discontent among traditional liberal-conservative elites, full endorsement of the political party was achieved at the beginning of the twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of the interwar totalitarian party, especially under the guise of Italian and German fascism, when ‘the party’ attained its most dominant influence as the sole source and locus of power. The chapter concludes by suggesting hidden and unaccounted heritages of that experience in post-war politics.

The introduction suggests that the problem of the acceptance of the political party is ‘ontological’: the party in itself is an element of division. As a consequence, the acceptance of party entails the acknowledgement of the possibility and feasibility of difference, division, conflict, and opposition. That is, it goes counter to the mainstream of what Western civilization has always considered desirable in society and in polity: union and harmony, consensus and agreement, concord and cohesion. The introduction illustrates the main passages that the book will present in the long road to party acceptance, up to a sort of reversal in recent times when the party has again come under the fire of discontent and criticism.

The Conclusion addresses the parties’ present condition in the European political systems. Indeed, at the dawn of the new century parties have become Leviathan with clay feet: powerful in the political arena thanks to control of state resources, but very weak in terms of legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. Only by abandoning the citadelle in which they are entrenched, recasting societal linkages, relinquishing all their privileges, and dismissing their self-referential attitude might they recover the confidence of the electorate. Maintaining a state-centred status will only lead to a dead end, and this will also harm the democratic system itself. The collapse of parties’ legitimacy inevitably affects democratic institutions: the mounting populist and plebiscitary wave suggests how pervasive is the crisis and how dramatic the challenge.

Chapter 6 deals with the resources parties enjoy at the present time, and examines how such resources impact on the parties’ internal dynamics and on the relationship with the mass public. The chapter first provides an empirical survey of the evolution of party membership in West European countries, and discusses the different balance between the collective-symbolic and selective-material incentives parties have been providing (and citizens demanding). Secondly, it presents a unique, original set of data on party finances demonstrating the growing and large availability of money in most of the cases. In this respect the chapter scrutinizes the relationship between increasing financial resources and declining membership. Finally, the parties’ interpenetration with the state is discussed considering their patronage and clientelistic practices. The chapter concludes with an assessment that the search for more resources and assets made parties richer but, at the same time, lonely and, ultimately, delegitimated.

Chapter 4 deals with the evolution of the party in the post-war period until the late 1960s. It suggests that because the recovery of democracy after the Second World War coincided with multi-partism, this credited parties with an unprecedented legitimation in the first post-war years. This general sentiment was built on the role parties played in all countries under Fascist or Nazi rule, and the more parties were active, the more confidence they gained. The positive reception of parties went hand in hand with their organizational development. However, precisely when parties deployed their full strength, they were tamed by societal and technological transformation. The chapter discusses how the parties’ response to 1960s’ post-industrialization by becoming catch-all structures depressed their legitimation. The post-war general consensus on the parties’ central role faded, opening the way for a new type of party criticism: parties now were considered not divisive enough but rather too consensual.

The Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) constituted the centre of gravity in post-war Italian politics. The party collapsed after 1992, due to long-term changes in Italian society and the eruption of the Clean Hands investigation into political corruption. The DC lost more than half its vote in the 1994 elections: Why did the party lose so much? And where did its votes go? Our answer highlights the effects of modernisation and secularisation as key causes in the demise of the DC vote and in the dispersion of its vote to other parties: parties claiming a lineage from the DC, either truly DC-legacy parties (the PPI, the CCD, the CDU, the UDC and the Margherita), or newcomers on the centre right (Forza Italia and the Northern League), or, finally, the by-products of the party-system’s transformation (the PD and PdL). This article shows that the DC-legacy parties and the Northern League were the most effective in attracting former DC voters. It also demonstrates, once more, the importance of...

This analysis challenges the consensus that, in post-war Italy the Catholic party [Democrazia Cristiana (Dc)], actively supported by the Catholic Church, fostered a process of vote nationalization. The paper, drawing upon a more fine-grained level of analysis, different statistical measures, and within and across regional models, provides a more nuanced interpretation. According to our analysis, although the Dc effectively acted as a homogenizing agent until the late 1970s, after that decade the processes of modernization and secularization fostered the decline of religious-based politics, and of the Dc itself. Such decline opened the way for the re-emergence of a territorial cleavage and a consequent dis-homogenization of Italian electoral politics. The paper demonstrated that the impact of modernization and secularization on the vote for the Catholic party is more significant considering the five Italy’s geo-political areas rather than the country as a whole. Moreover, the divergent path in the five areas testifies the re-emergence of territory in the Italian electoral behaviour. Territorial heterogeneity, modernization, and secularization were central to the collapse of the Dc.

West European party systems are facing a period of change (Crewe and Denver 1985; Dalton 1988; Dalton et al. 1984; Daalder and Mair 1983; Mair 1984, 1989a,b; Wolinetz 1988). This change is observ able at two levels, elect oral and partisan. At the elect oral level, intra party volat il ity has progress ively accel er ated in the 1980s and‘there is little evid ence that this flux is likely to abate’ (Mair, 1989b: 169). At the partisan level, a series of indic at ors show the accel er ated process of ‘decom pos i tion of estab lished party ties’ (Dalton, 1988). The decline of party iden ti fic a tion, of the number of party members and of the degree of partisan involve ment (Mair, 1984) all indic ate that the previ ous endur ing ties between the elect or ate and estab lished parties are progress ively fading away, thus enabling the emer gence of new parties and/or new agen cies for the aggreg a tion of demands (Mair, 1984, 1989a; Reider, 1989).

Analysis of the main political events in Italy in the year 2008

Analysis of the main political events of the year 2006

Analysis of the Italian political and institutional events with particular reference to the evolution of the party system the results of elections and the composition of the national government.

This paper analyses the impact of socioeconomic and religious factors in explaining the long-run electoral decay of the dominant party in Italy’s so-called “First Republic” (the Catholic Dc), and the emergence of the regional autonomous Lega Nord-Northern League on the Dc’s debris. On the basis of a unique data set collected by the authors this paper examines: a) the effects of modernization and secularization of the Dc electoral dénouement with particular reference to the change over time of the religious and rural constituencies, the two main DC reservoir of votes; b) the attraction of former Dc voters by the Lega Nord particularly in the old DC territorial bastion of support, characterized by high religiosity and concentration of direct cultivators. The research demonstrates the relevance and persistence of structures profondes such as religion and rural property in the electoral behaviour over a long span of time ranging from 1953 to 2008.

The authors examine the effects of modernization and secularization on the vote for the religious party in the Italian First Republic (1948–1992). In addition to modernization and secularization, they also introduce two new factors to the analysis: the importance of institutionalized Church and effects of the Church’s Vatican II reforms. Italy is of particular relevance because of the centrality of the Catholic religion in the Italian society and politics, and the domination of the religious party—the Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana; DC) in the country’s party system until 1992. The authors analyze the impact on the DC vote of a series of indicators of modernization and secularization and of Church organization and reform. The uniqueness of the analysis rests on the exceptional detailed and historical data for the Italian commune ( N = 6,140) across this time period and the use of advanced quantitative techniques. The analysis confirms the traditional interpretation of secularization but also stresses effects of the failure of the Church’s reforms of Vatican II. These reforms, which deemphasized the institutionalized Church in favor of a more individualized, spiritual view, were intended as a response to modernization. Instead, the reforms hastened the decline affiliated organizations and the religious party.