Chiara Fiorelli - Political Party Funding and Private Donations in Italy

The study of interest groups and their role in political life has undergone somewhat of a renaissance in recent years. Long standing scholarly themes such as interest groups influence mobilization, formation, and bias, are being addressed using new and novel data sets and methods. There are also new and exciting themes, such as digital activism, the role of ICTs in enabling collective action and the growth of global advocacy networks, are being added. Contemporary debates about the role of commercial lobbyists and professionalized interest representation are also highly salient. Together, they draw an ever larger and broader constituency to the study of interest groups and advocacy. This series seeks to capture both new generation studies addressing long standing themes in new ways and innovate scholarship posing new and challenging questions that emerge in a rapidly changing world. The series encourages contributions from political science (but also abutting disciplines such as public policy and governance, economics, law, history, international relations and sociology) that speak to these themes. It welcomes work undertaken at the level of sub-national, national and supra-national political systems, and particularly encourages comparative or longitudinal studies. The series is open to diverse methodologies and theoretical approaches. The book series will sit alongside and complement the Interest Groups & Advocacy journal.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14850

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Names and labels of political parties analysed.

Since at least two decades, the political partys function as the primary collective actor has been questioned from a variety of perspectives, and many scholars have focused on the progressive delegitimisation that threatens to alter its representational role. The dynamics of political financing, particularly the role of private money, enable a novel understanding of the linkages between political representatives and civil society. This work attempts to stimulate discourse about the relationships between donors and political actors by examining the case of Italy in a comparative context.

Without a doubt, significant changes in the way politics operates have arisen over the past 50 years. As a result of the restructuring of critical, long-standing relationships between individuals and the state, new responsibilities and behaviours have been established for both private citizens and public actors. The hollowing out of conventional cleavages and citizens political behaviour, as well as their modes of representation, has defined new relations between civil society and the political parties that represent their interests. Political parties, on the other hand, have remained the most powerful collective players, owing to their direct access to public office through democratic elections.

However, among Western democracies, political parties now are facing critical challenges that affect their organisational nature and their representational role as legitimised political actors (Ignazi, ), leading to narrower representation with specific policy aims that challenge the role of political parties in the articulation of citizens demands.