The personal party: an analytical framework

Abstract

IntroduzioneAfter sharing, through its various steps of evolution, the form and status of a corporate body, the party organization is falling prey to the virus of personalization, which is invading so many realms of contemporary life. Italy provides the clearest example of this cross-national trend with Silvio Berlusconi’s personal party. As a media tycoon and one of the wealthiest men in the world, Berlusconi could rely on a skilled professional apparatus as well as on huge financial means to set up, in a few months, a vote-generating machine and become a Prime Minister. His party model has been widely imitated, by both center-right and center-left organizations, with variations and deviations. This article presents an overview of the development of personal parties in Italy and an analytical framework based on Max Weber’s types of personal power.

Discursive Institutionalism as Framework of Analysis for Multi-Vector Power Relations in Organizing Political Parties

“…The role of these personal actors with various backgrounds of interests (Ladkin & Probert, 2019;Ufen, 2019) in these political party institutions extends the reach of institutional work externally (Arter, 2016). This is in line with the new institutional views derived from Panebianco and Randall-Svåsand's institutional views which incorporate external elements (Calise, 2015). The struggle for existence in these institutions encourages political actors to compete with and influence each other in political party institutions (Ayan Musil & Dikici Bilgin, 2016;Scarrow et al, 2017).…”

“…Intra-Party Democracy requires a party leader to engage in external relations, external coordination, reach out to social elements, and party leaders need internal support for these functions to smooth the hold public office effort such as building coalition (Lehrer, 2016). Trends in political personalization (Calise, 2015;Dalton et al, 2003;Emanuele et al, 2015;Emanuele & Marino, 2016;Garzia, 2013;Meeks, 2017;Rahat & Hazan, 2013;Shin, 2017;Tan, 2006) in Intra-Party Democracy has shifted the political process from party institutions to interpersonal (Rahat & Hazan, 2013). This fact further opens up a more fluid, multi-space institutional discourse of political parties (Susewind, 2020), and requires a perspective that further explains micro-subjective relations that describe relations between actors (Serpa & Ferreira, 2019).…”

“…This article aims to provide theoretical elaboration to increase the explanation of Intra-Party Democracy on power relations among actors with a micro-subjective approach. For this reason, the article offers a model of Discursive Institutionalism developed from Schmidt's thought (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016;Larsson, 2015;Schmidt, 2008Schmidt, , 2017bSchmidt, 2010;Schmidt, 2012;Van Gorp et al, 2011) which highlights the role of actors, personal, in line with Intra-Party Democracy which has shifted to the role of personal politics (Calise, 2015;Emanuele & Marino, 2016;Mikola, 2017;Rahat & Hazan, 2013). The perspective of Discursive Institutionalism uses the communicative power discourse approach (Schmidt, 2008(Schmidt, , 2017b, to elaborate multi-vector intra-party democracy, which involves multi-actor, multi-political, multi-directional resources related to social base functions that contain norms, regulations, policies and social practices (Hurlbert & Gupta, 2019).…”

The Presidential Party: A Theoretical Framework for Comparative Analysis

“…Therefore, he or she needs to build ad hoc parliamentary majorities to support his or her legislative activity. In particular, the independent candidates are in fact 'outsiders' or 'newcomers' (Carreras, 2012) who create their own party (Calise, 2015) to launch and support their candidacy for the presidential election (especially in Latin America as indicated by the cases of Fujimori in Peru, Correa in Ecuador or Uribe in Colombia) (Carreras, 2014(Carreras, , 2017. This situation can potentially lead to a surge of president-legislature conflict.…”

Visions of Europe: emerging challenges for the European project in the aftermath of the 2014 European Parliament elections

“…Thus, for the first time, voters had the opportunity to clearly identify the nominees running for the head of the European executive. The aim of this was twofold: to exploit the mobilisation effect of personalisation (Musella and Webb 2015;Calise 2015) in order to create a stronger connection with citizens, and to bridge the EU accountability gap (Gattermann, de Vreese, and van der Brug 2016).…”