The personalization of Italian political parties in three acts

2014

Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 2015

IntroduzioneParty leaders have become more powerful and autonomous actors in recent years by developing a direct and personal relationship with citizens. As anticipated in the United States (Lowi, 1985), the rise of the ‘personal leader’ seems to have occurred in many European democracies, both in old parties and in more recently formed parties, with a widespread tendency for them to be promoted and controlled by individual leaders. Nevertheless, party leadership remains quite a neglected theme in political science. Through a data set including ~500 party presidents in 13 democracies, this article focusses on the personalization of party leadership by comparing Italy with other Western countries. More particularly, new procedures for the selection of party chairs, the centralization of power in political parties, and the new role of party leaders in the legislative/governmental arena are analysed, given their importance to such a process. The article summarizes new data on the party...

Previous literature (e.g., McAllister 2007) has plainly assumed that the ‘personalization of politics’ in Western democracies is in large part due to the widespread ‘partisan dealignment’ going on in these societies. This paper provides an assessment of the causal relationship between these two phenomena in the Second Italian Republic, attempting to demonstrate that partisan dealignment is caused by – and not a cause of – the personalization of politics. Alternative explanations for the rapid weakening of partisan ties in the period 1994-2008 will be evaluated; then, it will be shown the prominence of leaders’ image among the determinants of individual (de)alignment with political parties; finally, it will be revealed how a generalized decrease in the number of partisan is linked to the (equally generalized) deterioration of the overall image of political leaders.

Political Studies, 2013

Despite the electoral success of Silvio Berlusconi's two political parties, little theoretical and empirical work has been done on Forza Italia (FI) and the Popolo Della Libertà (PDL – People of Freedom). This article aims to fill these gaps. Following a short overview of the history of FI and the PDL, it discusses how scholars have conceived of Forza Italia. Building on the criteria of Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner for the definition of a political party, a first operational definition is then offered of the term most used to classify FI and the PDL: the ‘personal party’. On the basis of this, the article considers whether the PDL is another personal party akin to Forza Italia. This is done, first, by briefly considering the party statute and communications and, second, by examining the views expressed in interviews conducted across Italy with PDL elected representatives and ordinary party members.

Populism in contemporary Italian Politics, 2022

Populism is a chameleonic phenomenon, able to merge with existing and developing models of political organization, and thus underlying the politicization of new political movements (Taggart 2000; Mudde 2007; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012). The rise of populism is accompanied, on the one hand, by the depoliticization of large segments of political regulation and the establishment of public policies, especially in the field of finance, that exacerbate the ‘crisis’ of representative politics (Fawcett, Flinders and Hay 2017) and, on the other, by the cartelization of mainstream political parties (Katz and Mair 1995; 2018). In Italy, as in other European democracies, populism goes hand in hand with an increased feeling of resentment towards the political elite. This is an integral part of the silent counter-revolution that determines the polarization of winners and losers of new social processes on a global scale

This book, published with research funds from the University of Rome La Sapienza, aims at disseminating knowledge about the Italian system of political parties and political foundations among non-Italian scholars, in the light of the recent legislative reforms in this field. Due to their nature as free associations of citizens under art. 49 Cost., political parties are supposed to enjoy a full autonomy in determining their own purposes, internal organisation and financial management. However, the recent regulation on the funding of political parties contains provisions aimed at influencing the contents of party statutes, imposing upon them several organisational obligations. Moreover, some draft laws concerning the internal regulation of parties have been proposed, with the idea of making intra-party democracy not only a prerequisite for obtaining funds, but also for competing in elections. However, many argue that a law should be the least invasive possible, and parties should instead proceed to self-reformation. The stronger the erosion process of party organisations and of political cultures is, the more strongly affirmed will be the personalised models of political organisation, in which even the funding of the organisation's own public viability is managed autonomously. This is why ever more frequently some political leaders make use of think tanks for fund-raising, by virtue of the broad degree of autonomy that they enjoy.

Contemporary Italian Politics, 2020

This article focuses on the evolution of the organizational profiles of Italian parties during the years of the so-called Second Republic. Most of the parties born at the beginning of the 1990s have undergone uncertain organizational development processes: in only a few cases has it been possible to observe organizational consolidation. Specifically, we will analyse how different parties have regulated the vertical distribution of power between organizational layers, by identifying possible tendencies in the regulation of the powers and prerogatives of the party leader and the membership. In line with the assumptions of the dimensional approach underpinning this research, we maintain that parties operating within the same institutional context do not necessarily tend to converge in terms of their organizational profiles. The study will focus on the organizational development of 11 parties, from 1994 to 2018: the analysis is primarily based on their official records.

Social Networks, 2014

Building on two established perspectives on the political party, in this paper we view the party as an organized network of formal and informal relationships between individuals that reflects national cleavages. We test this interpretation using two Italian parties of the 1970s that played major roles in shaping political and social life of the country: the Christian Democrats, or DC, and the Communists, or PCI. The 1970s saw the culmination of the DC and PCI's two-party dominance of the Italian state. Further, it was during this same period that the economic and social contradictions of Italy's tumultuous post-World War II process of industrialization became apparent, making social cleavages easy to grasp. We use cosponsoring of bills between parliamentary members as a measure of formal and informal relationships within each party. We deem this appropriate in the context of a pure proportional electoral system and highly polarized audiences. Data comes from the lower chamber of the Parliament during the Sixth Legislative cycle (1972)(1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977). We use HLM to model dyadic interactions between MPs and distinguish between repeated cosponsoring of bills (strong ties) and single occurrences of cosponsoring (weak ties). Our results show that within each party, national cleavages significantly increased the likelihood of strong ties but were not relevant in structuring weak ties. We conclude that the party has an internal structure made of a network of MPs informed by external social cleavages and held together by the common goal of being reelected.

2017

This book, published with research funds from the University of Rome La Sapienza, aims at disseminating knowledge about the Italian system of political parties and political foundations among non-Italian scholars, in the light of the recent legislative reforms in this field. Due to their nature as free associations of citizens under art. 49 Cost., political parties are supposed to enjoy a full autonomy in determining their own purposes, internal organisation and financial management. However, the recent regulation on the funding of political parties contains provisions aimed at influencing the contents of party statutes, imposing upon them several organisational obligations. Moreover, some draft laws concerning the internal regulation of parties have been proposed, with the idea of making intra-party democracy not only a pre-requisite for obtaining funds, but also for competing in elections. However, many argue that a law should be the least invasive possible, and parties should instead proceed to self-reformation. The stronger the erosion process of party organisations and of political cultures is, the more strongly affirmed will be the personalised models of political organisation, in which even the funding of the organisation’s own public viability is managed autonomously. This is why ever more frequently some political leaders make use of think tanks for fund-raising, by virtue of the broad degree of autonomy that they enjoy.

2010

The Lega dei Ticinesi, founded in 1991 in Italian-speaking Switzerland, has often been studied as an example of a regionalist, populist or national-populist party, focusing on political agenda and style. This analysis will demonstrate how this party, from an organizational standpoint, is closer to the model of the "firm- business" model (Hopkin & Paolucci 1999), characterized by a strong centralization