Italian debates about ‘primaries election’ – as real instrument of grassroots participation and intra-party democracy - stay will opened. This new method of candidate selection starts, infact, a process with a lot of consequences for the electorate and for the same candidates. But also the causes that have induced some parties to adopt primaries, as instruments to improve political participation, have to be considered.
The three models of party organization (Katz, Mair 1995) – structure in the central office, in the public office and on the ground – are useful to investigate causes and consequences of primaries. Indeed, the procedures of primaries link these three levels (the staff to the leadership; effects in institutions and party activists and territory). However, what happens when this model is not applied to a ‘traditional party’, but rather to a ‘non-party’ born from the web and gone to the territory: made 'by citizens for citizens'. The party at issue is the ‘Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), that last 6 December completed its ‘Parlamentarie’. They were the first entirely made online attempt to select candidates for MPs offices. Who could really participate in this consultation? By means of which rules and, above all, how many candidates participated? Who were them? And how did they carry on their electoral campaign between web and territory?
The paper proposes a first analysis from a database about all candidates in 27 constituency of Italy: about 1400 candidates (aspirants Mps). Who were them? Where are they came from? And what did they do? What’s their relationship with another parts of M5S? This database also permits to monitoring the future activities of MPs, and values their contacts with militants, that elected them by the web.
