8
instead to coopt them, rather than building autonomous party organizations. The DC developed
in the post-war period through a process of ‘diffusion’, in which the party’s central leadership
was initially incapable of exercising any authority over the party organization in the periphery
(Panebianco 1988: 124-7). The presence of strong local notables with tight control over public
life in their zones of influence presented the DC with a fait accompli, and the electoral pressures
of the PCI at national level impelled the use of these notables to mobilize the electorate in the
South. Clientelism in this phase took its traditional form, with patrons (usually landowners or
other local authority figures) able to exploit the social deference and economic dependency of
their clients to get themselves, or their agents, elected.
The DC was also heavily dependent on the Catholic church for electoral mobilization.
The church and its lay organizations threw their weight behind the DC, exploiting the social
authority of the priesthood to deliver votes, and filling the gaps in the DC’s territorial party
infrastructure. For some party leaders, such as Fanfani, this constrained the party’s autonomy far
too much, and in the 1950s the party embarked on an organisational reform drive which
transformed its structure, bringing it closer to the model of a centralised mass party (Leonardi &
Wertman 1989: Chap.5). This new party model enhanced the party’s capacity for electoral
mobilization, and hence its autonomy from the church and employers’ lobbies. It also improved
internal party cohesion: local elites no longer enjoyed the same freedom of manoeuvre, partly due
to the emergence of an institutionalized system of party factions (Zuckerman 1979: Chap.5;
Allum 1997) which provided a greater level of articulation between centre and periphery than a
party leader alone could have achieved.
The more centralized DC did not, however, become a classic mass party. Party
membership increased significantly, but this did not supplant or replace the importance of
clientelistic patterns of mobilization. On the contrary, the new organizational arrangement
became the basis for a modernization and extension of clientelism. Under Fanfani’s leadership
the DC became an enthusiastic sponsor of state intervention in the economy, ostensibly as a
means of enhancing economic development and redressing the imbalance between the booming
North and the stagnating South, but surreptitiously as a way of institutionalizing and
strengthening the DC. A key element in this strategy was the decision to channel huge sums of
Convention