1
Introduction
Political parties in western democracies are under pressure. A variety of social, cultural
and economic forces have undermined their traditional organizational and electoral practices,
forcing them to change their strategies of electoral mobilization. Although the strength of these
pressures varies across democratic states, and some parties are coping rather better than others,
several major European parties have fundamentally changed the way they respond to their
electorates over the last two or three decades. Italy is a rather extreme example of this
phenomenon. In the immediate postwar period, Italian politics was dominated by the sharp
division between communism and conservative Catholicism, represented by two parties which
carried out the ‘classic form’ of interest aggregation. All this changed in the 1990s, as the major
parties either split, disintegrated or even disappeared, and completely new parties emerged, such
as the populist Northern League and Forza Italia, electoral vehicle of tycoon Silvio Berlusconi.
This amounted to perhaps the most comprehensive overhaul of political representation in postwar
West European history: the electoral volatility score for the 1992-94 period was 41.9%.
These are undoubtedly profound changes, and as such have received a good deal of
scholarly attention in recent years (egs Cotta and Isernia 1996, Gundle and Parker 1996, Ginsborg
2002). This paper therefore looks beyond the dramatic transformations of the 1990s and focuses
instead on some of the continuities in Italian parties’ responses to their electorates. Perhaps
surprisingly, some of the most interesting continuities can be found on the centre-right of the party
system, where the most visible changes have taken place. In the 1950s, the DC hegemonized this
political space, and was able to dominate coalition-building efforts, drawing on the parliamentary
support of small centre-right cadre parties. In the 1960s, as the DC’s electoral position weakened, it
was forced to bring the Socialists into the coalition, an arrangement known as the centrosinistra
(centre-left). Although the Socialists withdrew their support in the 1970s, they opted to cooperate
again with the DC in the pentapartito (‘five-party’) coalitions of the 1980s, which also included
three centre-right cadre parties. Then in the 1990s, the collapse of the pentapartito parties opened
the space for the new right-wing populist forces such as Forza Italia. In the midst of such
turbulence, the search for organizational continuity may appear unpromising. However, similar
Convention