The proposed paper deals with the changing “nature” of political parties in recent years. As we know, parties changed their relationship with the society and with the state. According to the well-know Katz and Mair interpretation (1995, 2009) in last decades parties have abandoned their presence “on the ground”, discarding mass membership and territorial penetration and anchorage. The parties’ difficulty and uneaseness to interpret the demands of the civil society, and correspondingly the waning of political involvement and mobilization through political parties by the citizens (partly due to the diluting of ideological fervor), were overcome by the parties’ move to a different environment. For their survival they directed themselves toward the state. They “penetrated” the state in order to acquire those resources that the society – party members and supporters – did no longer provide them with. Thanks to the introduction of laws granting generous state subsides for partisan activities, parties overcame the loss of resources produced by the shrinking of their mass membership (Scarrow and Burcu 2010). The money inflow from the state was mainly used by parties to reinforce their national headquarters: the central party bureau become larger and better equipped, with a more numerous and more professional staff. Such concentration of resources increased the party’s oligarchic temptation and reduced the national headquarters attention for the local party activity. In this way citizens and grass roots activists are left “alone”. The paper would speculate on the impact that larger amount of financial resources in the hands of national leaders had on the involvement of membership and, more generally, on the party legitimacy in front of the public opinion. Finally, the paper will investigate on the responses provided by the parties themselves to counteract the negative impact produced by their same evolution.
