Party and Democracy: The Uneven Road to Party Legitimacy
(Digital online)
Piero Ignazi,
Oxford University Press, USA (Publisher)
Published
2017
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Piero Ignazi,
Oxford University Press, USA (Publisher)
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Out Of Stock
The book suggests that, in the post-war period, parties shifted from a golden age of positive reception by public opinion and organizational development towards a more difficult relationship with society as long as it moved into post-industrialism. Parties were unable to master societal change and thus went towards the state to recover resources they were no longer able to extract from their constituencies. Therefore, parties have become richer and more powerful thanks to their interpenetration into the state, but they have paid for their pervasive presence in the society and the state with a declining legitimacy. The party today is caught in a dramatic contradiction. It has become a sort of Leviathan with clay feet: very powerful thanks to the resources it gets from the state and to its control of the societal and state sphere due to an extension of clientelistic and patronage practices; but very weak in terms of legitimacy and confidence in the eyes of the mass public. However, it is argued that there is still no alternative to the party, and the volume analyses hypotheses concerning the advancement of party democracy.
About the Author:
Piero Ignazi, Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Bologna
Piero Ignazi is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bologna. His recent publications include Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe (OUP, 2003, revised edition 2006), Political Parties and Political Systems (with A. Roemmele and D.Farrell, Praeger, 2005), and Italian Military Operations Abroad (with G.Giacomello and F. Coticchia, Palgrave, 2012).
