Online fundraising in Italy. Anticipating a trend?

Online fundraising has remained for a long time virtually absent from party websites in continental European countries. This can be explained by the importance of state funding to political parties across the region. Indeed, research has shown that political parties are more actively engaged in fundraising activities in countries where private sources of income are dominant, such as in the Anglo-Saxon area. This also holds for the online dimension of political fundraising. This paper observes the over-time evolution of online fundraising by political parties in Italy, a country where direct public funding to political parties was recently repealed. Thus, from being among the countries where parties mostly depended on state funds, parties in Italy were forced to turn to alternative sources of income. The Italian case offers an excellent context where to observe the way in which parties adapt to new forms of financing in a growing digital environment. By means of a content analysis of the functionality and design of party websites adapted from coding schemes originally developed by Gibson and Ward and of secondary literature in the field, the analysis will compare the evolution of fundraising activities (2000-2022) by political parties on their websites and observe if and how online fundraising patterns vary overtime and across parties. While empirically focusing on the Italian case, the paper will also provide a comparative discussion on the subject. Indeed, especially following the 2008 financial crisis, various are the European countries that amended laws to reduce the subsidies available to parties, suggesting a diminished state intervention in party financial matters in the coming future. It is therefore reasonable to expect that parties throughout the European continent will adapt and invest in innovative tools for raising money, with the potential added benefit of them reaching out more to citizens.