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Challenges of political participation and intra-party democracy: Bittersweet symphony from party membership and primary elections in Italy

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Abstract

In this article, we explore the impact of intra-party democratization processes on party membership. We analyze the opinions and attitudes of enrolled members on intra-party democracy instruments and on the use of open primaries. We investigate, with original data sets on Italy, the relationship between primaries and party members. How do enrolled members perceive internal democratization and primaries? Which factors contribute to explaining grassroots members’ opinion on primaries? We use the case of the Italian Democratic Party (PD) to argue that different subsets of the party membership (divided into new-style and old-style members, on the basis of their relationship with the party and their participatory style) have different views on primaries. Quantitative analysis of survey data on party members reveals two main findings. Our first result is that members approve and positively assess the adoption of new procedures of intra-party democracy. Second, membership style matters: old-style members react to the adoption of primary elections differently than new-style members. Indeed, old-style members understand primaries as a renovated chance of participating in the party’s activities, whereas for new-style members primaries give the opportunity for a new mode of participation. Our findings contribute to the existing empirical research on intra-party democracy and party membership, and have important implications for the triangular link between parties, members and primaries.

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Notes

  1. For instance, the Catalan Socialists have held primaries for selecting the mayoral candidate for Barcelona in 2015: www.primariesobertes2015.cat/.

  2. Following Hazan and Rahat (2010), we argue that candidate selection and leader election are two different political processes, but in the article we use the term ‘primary elections’ for identifying both processes interchangeably. Also, a primary election is an election that narrows the field of candidates before an election for office. Strictly speaking, the term ‘primary elections’ refers only to the selection of a party’s (or party coalition’s) candidates for public office, not to the selection of candidates for public office and the selection of a party’s leaders. We are using the term ‘primaries’ in an unusually broad sense, which refers to the concept of ‘primary and leadership elections’. Moreover, the same type of open primary elections is used in all intra-party elections in the PD, and the process does not differ by level of government or region.

  3. The phenomenon has become very relevant: since 2004, nearly 960 primary elections for selecting candidates for public office have been organized at local, regional, provincial and national level (Seddone and Venturino, 2013a). Moreover, the PD has also organized open primary elections to select: the party leader in 2007, 2009 and 2013, the chief executive candidate in 2005 and 2012, and candidates at national elections in 2012. This means that such inclusive procedures have significantly affected the party on the ground, involving (and socializing) members and supporters into this new mode of political participation.

  4. The new party is the result of the merger between the Democrats of the Left (heir of PCI) and the Daisy/Democracy is Freedom (heir of the leftist faction of DC).

  5. For space reasons, we cannot discuss at length here the process that brought to the creation of PD, that is, the merging of the two main political parties and their political cultures. For more details, we refer to Bordandini et al (2008).

  6. Since then, the party has organized almost 80 per cent of all primaries held in Italy (alone or in coalition with smaller leftist parties). At least at the local level, a ‘contagion effect’ can be recently seen: of over 952 local primaries (for selecting the mayoral candidate) held between 2004 and 2015, at least 37 have been organized by right wing parties (mainly by Berlusconi’s former PDL) or center-right coalitions (Seddone and Valbruzzi, 2013; Sandri and Venturino, 2016).

  7. The ideological nature of PD within the current Italian party system can be described as ‘center-left’, meaning that the ideological stances of the party (in terms of manifesto, policies and average positions of its affiliates and elected officials) are similar to those of an average European mainstream social-democratic party, and, while being more moderate, especially on ethical and socio-economic issues, than those of the far left (for example, SEL), PD’s positions are clearly more leftist than the positions of the main center and rightist parties (UDC, IDV, FI, FDI, NDC, LN and so on).

  8. The crucial concept of ‘political culture’ could also be helpful in explaining the different characteristics of new- and old-style members, in particular in the cases of members previously enrolled to the former PCI and DC. We cannot discuss this at length here for space reasons, but for the specific literature on the Italian parties’ culture and participation models (see mainly Pizzorno, 1966; Panebianco, 1982; Raniolo, 2007).

  9. Members agreed to be contacted by the party. The original plan was to keep the survey available for 30 days, but the resignation of the PD leader, related to the troubled election of the President of the Republic, forced us to close the survey before the deadline.

  10. We note that the regional distribution presents some distortions. The most over-represented region is Lombardia (+9.3 per cent): here respondents are in fact 17.7 per cent of the sample, though they are only 8.4 per cent of enrolled. Conversely, Campania (−7.2 per cent) is the most under-represented region with only 1 per cent of interviewed (see online Table SI2). Another source of distortion might be given by the over-representation of new-style members and under-representation of old-style members, given the stronger propensity for younger citizens to be online. As robustness checks, we re-estimate our model by splitting the sample by age and by omitting one region at a time. These analyses, reported in the online Appendix, do not alter the robustness of our results. Therefore, also considering the large number of respondents (and the high frame population coverage), we are reassured that our data can be used for conducting explorative analyses on the relationship between intra-party democracy and party members. However, we emphasize that the validity of our results is only guaranteed by the large N and that any generalization of the results to the general population of party members should be elaborated very cautiously.

  11. The two main candidates, Pier Luigi Bersani – leader of the party previously selected by primaries in the 2009 – and Matteo Renzi – his young challenger, now PM, and former mayor of Florence – represent two extremely different ideas of party mobilization: the former expresses an old-style idea of party organization, very close to local branches and deeply rooted on the ground; the latter, instead, represents a catch-all approach, more oriented to mobilize external supporters and perceived as a breakaway figure from the consolidated establishment of the party.

  12. To account for the issue of regional over- and under-representation above mentioned, we have re-estimated the baseline model omitting one region at a time and this did not affect the significance and direction of the coefficients of our main explanatory variables. This analysis is available upon request.

  13. For this reason, we have decided to omit from the analysis interaction terms between membership style and other independent variables, as both types of members evaluate positively the participative practice. We have also run separate models with interaction terms, but none of them was statistically significant.

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Acknowledgements

A first version of this paper has been presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. We thank the participants of the panel, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their comments and suggestions. We would like to thank the research group Candidate and Leader Selection and Tore Corona of the Italian Democratic Party for their help in the data collection. A special thank is to Fulvio Venturino.

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Correspondence to Giulia Sandri.

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Bernardi, L., Sandri, G. & Seddone, A. Challenges of political participation and intra-party democracy: Bittersweet symphony from party membership and primary elections in Italy. Acta Polit 52, 218–240 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2016.4

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