Piero Ignazi

1. Digitalisation has become an increasingly important component of party organisation. What initially appeared to be a set of tools for electoral communication and campaign outreach has gradually ...

Why are political parties on the defendant’s bench? What do people want from parties today? Is there any chance of recapturing citizens’ hearts and minds? This paper addresses questions linked to the crisis of confidence in parties in western European countries. After surveying some hypotheses on the origin of the discontent, the paper suggests that parties are trapped by an untenable pledge derived from their original connotation. The pledge concerns intra-party workings more than party activity in the political system. The paper sustains that although extensive criticism of parties is justified, they show some resilience. People still expect party profile and behaviour to be as they were in the post-war golden age, though recent transformations have downplayed many features that characterized the popular model of democracy. Nostalgia for past party politics clashes with present party reality and further depresses public esteem of political parties.

In recent years, academic literature has stressed the declining importance of social class and religion as determinants of vote. In particular, many scholars have found that the working-class vote is no longer mostly addressed to socialist parties, whereas religious people still massively support confessional and conservative parties. This article explores the actual resilience of the two cleavages with particular attention to the relationship between religion and socialist parties. Our analysis, based on European Social Survey (ESS) data covering 13 West European countries in the period 2002–2014, proves that ‘a-religiosity’ – negative attitudes towards religion – has overcome social class as the determinant of a socialist vote, thanks to the emergence of a divisive ethical–moral agenda. This process is more visible in those countries where the Church and religious associations play an active role in the political arena and the ethical–moral issues have been politicized, as in Catholic and multi-faith countries.

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-à-vis parties comes from a mismatch between public expectations and parties’ performances. The present lack of confidence in parties is not attributable to failings in terms of representation or the fulfilment of policy promises. A more subtle process is apparently in operation. Parties are, rather, criticized and even despised for the image they and their representatives project, an image far removed from what people expect. Public opinion is, in fact, affected by what Zigmunt Bauman called retrotopia, that is, nostalgia for the mass party. The idealization of that type of party, still so entrenched in the European people, has caught parties in a trap: as they cannot return that model whose premises no longer exist, they have introduced some changes; but they have moved in a direction that is the opposite of expectations as they have acquired more and more resources. In this way, they have heightened the image of a privileged, self-assured and uncaring organization, distant from ordinary people. The contrast between the idealized vision of the mass party and the parties’ present reality has caused the unremitting loss of confidence in them

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 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?

In this article we discuss 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.

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.