4 The Italian Lega Nord

McDonnell, Duncan; Vampa, Davide

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-58197-6_5

Cited by 36 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Hence, despite the resignations in recent years of the charismatic founder-leaders of these parties, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Umberto Bossi, each party has gone on to enjoy considerable rises in support at elections and/or in polls under new leaders. We also know from work on these parties that they have had far better developed grassroots organizations than FI/PDL or PUP (Ivaldi and Lanzone, 2016;McDonnell and Vampa, 2016). Moreover, other research has found that, in the case of the LN, even when Bossi was utterly dominant in the party and viewed as 'charismatic', members certainly did not think that the party would fail to survive him (McDonnell, 2016).…”

Section: Personal Parties Have Light Organizations and Lack A Permanementioning

confidence: 99%

Inside the personal party: Leader-owners, light organizations and limited lifespans

Kefford

McDonnell

2018

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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Scholars in recent decades have discussed the emergence of a new leader-dominated party type, variously described as ‘personal’, ‘personalistic’ and ‘personalist’. However, there has been no original comparative research examining whether (and how) such parties resemble one another organizationally and whether they constitute a distinct organizational type. This article does so by comparing the parties of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Clive Palmer in Australia. Based on interviews with those in the parties and party documents, we find our cases share two distinctive organizational features: (1) the founder-leader’s dominance of the party and perceived centrality to its survival and (2) the relationship between the party and members saw active members discouraged and organization at the local level was extremely limited/non-existent. Building on this analysis, we then propose three criteria for identifying other personal parties and point to the existence of a possible subtype. We conclude that the emergence of personal parties requires us to reconsider our understanding of contemporary party organizations in advanced democracies.

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Section: Personal Parties Have Light Organizations and Lack A Permanementioning

confidence: 99%

Inside the personal party: Leader-owners, light organizations and limited lifespans

Kefford

McDonnell

2018

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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“…The Northern League is a much older political subject. It was established in 1991 as a federation of regional parties of northern and north-central Italy, by Umberto Bossi (McDonnell and Vampa 2016). In 2013, Matteo Salvini defeated Bossi in a leadership election, rebranding the party as "La Lega" [The League] and reducing its original regionalist-federalist emphasis, whilst embracing nationalism, Euroscepticism and opposition to external immigration.…”

Section: Coalition's Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…marked by different (and to some extent contradictory) histories claims and visions. This article charts the "governmentality" of the Yellow-Green coalition, that is, the tangle of epistemic, affective and mythological processes by which such a fluid political subject secured its existence framing a number of issues as political emergencies to be tackled by supposedly distinctive strategies (Rose and Miller 1992) Although the Yellow-Green case has been the target of a sustained scholarly scrutiny (e.g., McDonnell and Vampa 2016;Engesser et al 2017;Funke and Trebesch 2017;Mosca and Tronconi 2019), an analysis of its governmentality has not been outlined thus far. Yet this operation would be significant, for two interlinked reasons.…”

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confidence: 99%

Techno-sovereignism: the political rationality of contemporary Italian populism

Maglione

2021

Theor Soc

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This article provides an original exploration of the self-identified populist coalition leading the Italian government between 2018 and 2019. The analysis, informed by a governmentality approach, starts by scrutinising the economic, social, and cultural issues framed as political “problems” by the coalition, also highlighting the tensions underlying such constructions. The second step charts how this political subject sought to address those problems by deploying an array of political technologies. From examining these two dimensions, the article then can discern the composite rationality—techno-sovereignism—that drove precariously the coalition’s art of government. Finally, the article sketches out some forms of contestation against the techno-sovereignist operations, whose significance may stretch beyond the Italian borders. Overall, although the Italian populist coalition turned out to be ephemeral, the dynamics that characterized its emergence and functioning could still be used heuristically to understand the interactions and reciprocal adjustments possibly used by right-wing and technocratic populist groups to exert political power conjointly.

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“…Political parties can, therefore, create specific blends of regionalism and populism that, combined with (segments of) other ideologies, would take a right-wing or left-wing (or neither left nor right) colour. While several works have already studied right-wing regionalist populist parties, such as the Lega Nord, the Lega dei Ticinesi and the Vlaams Belang (Mazzoleni 2005;De Winter et al 2006;Albertazzi 2006;McDonnell and Vampa 2016), this article focuses on two cases of left-wing regionalist populism. In order to do that, some specific features of left-wing populism need to be briefly introduced.…”

Section: Political Parties and Ideological Blends: Left-wing Regionalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 Secondly, until very recently, studies on populism in Western Europe have overwhelmingly focused on right-wing (or radical right) populist parties (Betz 1994;Betz and Immerfall 1998;Rydgren 2005;Mudde 2007). This particular empirical focus has allowed some scholars to identify parties, such as the Lega Nord in Italy, Lega dei Ticinesi in Switzerland and the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, that combine regionalism and populism with right-wing ideological elements, such as nativism and xenophobia (Mazzoleni 2005;De Winter 1998;Albertazzi 2006;McDonnell and Vampa 2016). 3 In contrast, parties combining regionalism, populism and left-wing ideological segments have remained largely ignored.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Left-wing regionalist populism in the ‘Celtic’ peripheries: Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party’s anti-austerity challenge against the British elites

Massetti

2018

Comp Eur Polit

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The article shows how the main regionalist parties in Scotland and Walesthe Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru-have engaged with a popu-list discourse in the wake of the Great Recession. Based on a qualitative analysis of party manifestos and party-elite interviews, the article shows that the two parties have adopted a left-wing populist discourse, based on a critique of austerity policies. In this way, albeit from distinctively regionalist perspective, they performed roles very similar to that of other contemporary left-wing populist parties, particularly in Southern Europe. The Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru were able to frame their anti-austerity stances within a populist discourse because all three traditional British parties shared a preference for pro-austerity economic policies. Therefore, in Laclau's terms, the two 'Celtic' parties' attack on austerity constituted an open challenge to the hegemonic discourse of the British 'power bloc'. Analogous to the expansion of a right-wing anti-establishment protest in British politics (monopolized by the UKIP), the two parties (particularly the Scottish one) capitalized on the expansion of a left-wing populist area. This strategy has lately become less viable because Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party broke with the pro-austerity consensus among British elites.

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4 The Italian Lega Nord

Cited by 36 publications

References 15 publications

Inside the personal party: Leader-owners, light organizations and limited lifespans

Inside the personal party: Leader-owners, light organizations and limited lifespans

Techno-sovereignism: the political rationality of contemporary Italian populism

Left-wing regionalist populism in the ‘Celtic’ peripheries: Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party’s anti-austerity challenge against the British elites

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