Owner parties and party institutionalisation in Italy: is the Northern League exceptional?

Abstract

Studies on party institutionalisation commonly argue that parties with personalist leadership and weak organisation are unlikely to remain in power beyond leadership succession. In other words, these parties will rarely attain their own institutionalisation. From this perspective, the recent Italian political reality represents a conundrum. Three parties of this type – Northern League; Forza Italia; Italy of Values – confronted significant resignation issues concerning their leaders, but only the League, contrary to the theory, made a decisive step toward institutionalisation by removing its founding father and remaining an actor with national blackmail potential. This article addresses this challenge and provides a solution to this conundrum. In particular, the article demonstrates that an approach that considers both party factors and critical events is necessary to account fully for the variance of outcomes and, more generally, for party change.

Keywords:

• party institutionalisation
• personalist leadership
• Italian party system
• events
• Forza Italia
• Lega Nord

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the XXVIII Annual Conference of the Italian Political Science Association (Perugia, 11–13 September 2014) and the Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy 2014 The Italian Crisis: Twenty years on (London, 21–22 November). The author would like to thank all the participants of the two conferences and, in particular, Selena Grimaldi and Luca Verzichelli for their suggestions. He also thanks the editors and the two anonymous reviewers of Modern Italy for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I have chosen not to use the term ‘personalist’ for the party as a whole, but only for the leadership (whereas Kostadinova and Levitt talk about dominant leaders), in order to make the terminological distinction with personalistic parties as defined by Gunther and Diamond stronger and avoid any confusion with more general classifications in the literature (see, for example, Pasquino 2014a).

2. I take the liberty of borrowing the phrase ‘critical junctures’ from the historical institutionalist literature (Collier and Collier 1991; see also Acemoglu and Robinson 2012).

3. Formally, the first Forza Italia, People of Freedom and the current Forza Italia are three different parties. Nonetheless, they are strictly linked to each other and can be treated as three faces of the same Silvio Berlusconi creation. In this analysis, I will therefore treat them as a single party.

4. The statute can be found on http://forzaitalia.it/speciali/statutoforzaitalia04.pdf, accessed March 19, 2015.

5. Comprising Maroni himself, the party prominent Roberto Calderoli and the former president of the Venetian League, Manuela Dal Lago.

6. “La Lega a un passo da Forza Italia. E i democratici perdono sei punti.” Corriere della Sera, January 18, 2015.

7. See for instance “Il diktat di Fitto a Berlusconi: ‘Basta con le nomine dall'alto’.” Corriere della Sera, May 29, 2014; “Elezione presidente della repubblica. Mattarella e la sconfitta che carica Fitto: ‘Il partito va azzerato’.” Corriere della Sera, January 30, 2015.

8. See “Italia dei Valori, indietro tutta. Di Pietro: ‘Tornare alle origini’. Il suo nome sparisce dal simbolo.” La Stampa, September 14, 2013 and “‘Beni dei mafiosi per finalità sociali’. La riscossa di Antonio Di Pietro.” La Stampa, February 5, 2014.