“Particracy”

Democratic theorists and political scientists conventionally equate the contestation of parties’ legitimacy with the nadir of party democracy and interpret antipartyism as the distinctive feature of populist democracy. This chapter on the theories and practices of antipartyism in democratic Italy unveils a different story. Deep-seated hostility to parties has been a congenital feature of Italian democracy since its very beginning and has run consistently throughout its trajectory, from the mid-1940s up to the present. Dissatisfaction with the centrality of parties in civil society and the legislative has been the backbone of the Italian Republic and given cohesiveness to its history across the decades. The chapter draws on political history, political thought, and the history of ideas to revisit, contextualize, and connect some of the most salient chapters in the history of the notion of “particracy” (partitocrazia) throughout the unfolding of Italian democracy. At the same time, it emphasizes their relevance for the study of populism, and its critique of parties, in contemporary political theory and science. A study of Italy’s pre-populist antipartyism, the chapter shows, suggests three main conclusions that are relevant for ongoing debates on populism. First, it challenges the stadial vision of the life and times of representative government and the underlying assumption that antipartyism, or the crumbling legitimacy of parties, signals the decay of party democracy. Second, it shows that in modern representative government, the alternative to parliamentary democracy (based on pluralism and compromise) is inevitably plebiscitary democracy (based on consensus and plebiscites). Finally, it reveals that the critique of party politics within and without the legislative is often part and parcel of a broader institutional (re)vision, in the attempt to constrain parliamentary deliberation and empower the executive (and its leader) over the legislative (and its parties).