Italian Politics: The Year of the Tycoon by Richard S Katz

Author:Richard S Katz [Katz, Richard S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429968099
Google: aQDFDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-05-04T10:24:45+00:00

In the mass party model, on the other hand, (communist) parliamentary personnel were chosen by the managing structures of the party (with rigid control from the center over local proposals). Internal competition was kept to a minimum, and the percentage of re-nominated members not re-elected was almost zero. In this way the length of service of Members of Parliament was held in check by the party, and the position of deputy or senator represented a necessary “moment of passage” in the career model of the communist politician, leading to other duties within the party organization chart.

All other parties used recruitment criteria inspired by these two models, or perhaps managed a compromise between the two, as in the case of the PSI. The one element common to all of them was always the centrality of the party in the consolidation of the political class and party professionalization, even if the mass party model showed a more evident dependence of parliamentary personnel on the (limited) party leadership.[6]

The use of this last model by the PCI began to undergo a transformation beginning in the second half of the 1980s. Weakened by electoral decline and stimulated by international events, the PCI showed signs of a renovation of its own political class—signs which did not, however, undermine the classic procedures of selection and control by the party apparatus.[7] Following the transformation at the Twentieth Congress and the birth of the PDS, this reorganization assumed a qualitative value as well, as the socio-political characteristics of the new party’s personnel show. The PDS has tended then, albeit not without effort, to abandon the classic model of leadership recruitment that featured long labor union and party experience. The Rifondazione Comunista, however, itself renewed on the quantitative level, represents the continuity of that model.

In the case of the Christian Democrat’s leadership, a significant change in the classic model of recruitment cannot be said to have taken place before the “earthquake” of 1994. In spite of the impact of significant factors like the evident party crisis (resulting in the loss of many seats, especially in the North) and the abolition of the multiple preference system, the confirmation of a high number of sitting MPs even in 1992, demonstrates just how such a model accompanies the whole life cycle of the party.

To consider the mystery of the decline or the transformation of these models at the time of the disappearance of the two parties to which they refer, it is useful to return to the data relative to the background of the MPs. To enhance the analytical capacity of such data, I have constructed two indexes relative to the political experience of the new parliamentary class: the first is the simple result of the intersection of the amount of parliamentary experience with the members’ age (Table 3). The second instead is a (crude) index of political professionalization, obtained from the intersection of the data relative to party duties and local political experience (Table 4).[8] The results of these analyses will be

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