Chiara Fiorelli

This paper explores the dynamics of political market entropy in Rome between 1993 and 2023, analyzing 29 electoral cycles across local, regional, national, and European levels. Using Shannon’s entropy as an indicator of systemic uncertainty, the study examines how the fragmentation of the political offer interacts with voter participation and abstention. Building on previous systemic approaches and the behavioral insights in the scientific literature of social sciences, entropy is treated both as a dependent and an independent variable—a product of political fragmentation and a driver of voter disaffection. The findings reveal a gradual increase in entropy over three decades, punctuated by cyclical oscillations consistent with self-regulating dynamics in the political system. The results suggest that the Roman political market behaves as a complex adaptive system, oscillating between periods of dispersion and re-consolidation, pluralism and stability. This entropic interpretation offers a novel framework for understanding how contemporary democracies process uncertainty and adapt to changing patterns of competition and participation.

Electoral competition is quite expensive. The prevalent idea in Western countries is that public funding may contribute to and preserve the system’s fairness and pluralism, defending political parties from the influence of big money. However, the Italian reform of political funding approved in 2014 appears to move in an opposite direction, encouraging political players to extract private sources while discarding public support. Such a choice entails hazards associated with several current phenomena, including system transparency, financial appeals from competing players and the rising personalization of politics. This article describes the financial status of the major Italian political parties in 2013 and 2018, with an emphasis on the allocation of private funds. Unfortunately, political parties’ responses to the new regulation came late, resulting in significant variations and disparities. Private money needs regulation and restrictions before being established as the primary source of revenue for political competition. At present, Italian political parties are left with few guidelines and appear to be navigating by sight.

Political finance is an important aspect of the study of how power is distributed among the organizational faces of political parties: the party on the ground (POG), the party in central office (PCO) and the party in public office (PPO). The end of the state finance era in Italy (between 2013 and 2017) may have affected intra-party relations, moving political actors towards the (re-)discovery of the financial potential of grassroots and volunteer support. This article contributes to the analysis of parties’ resilience since the party finance reform adopted in Italy in 2014. It focuses on the resources activated and used by different political actors seeking new ways to survive since the public financing regime was dismantled between 2013 and 2018. The impact of political financing reform should contribute to reshaping how power is distributed within parties: as the PPO becomes increasingly unimportant in providing financial resources, party organization is moving beyond the cartel party model.

The lack of financial resources is an often-cited hurdle for women pursuing political careers. However, empirical analysis of the dynamics of the private funding of women candidates and its potential implications for their political careers is still scant, particularly for countries outside the anglophone regions. This paper contributes to the scholarly debate by focusing on the gendered patterns in campaign fundraising in Italy, where radical changes to the party funding regime and multiple reforms to the electoral laws may have changed the structure of opportunity for fundraising by women candidates. We analyse patterns of private funding for men and women candidates in four national elections between 1996 and 2018. Our analysis, triangulated with semi-structured interviews with women candidates, shows that differences exist in fundraising patterns between male and female candidates in Italy. It reveals differences in the quality of candidates’ fundraising networks and confirms that political affiliation (to right-wing parties) and incumbency have an effect on the amount of donations received, thus granting women candidates greater access to private donations.