ABSTRACT
The nexus between voting and political parties has received only occasional attention from historian’s of late medieval Italy. This may be because, whereas the frequency and centrality of voting and elections in that time and place is beyond doubt, little consensus exists on the suitability of the category of 'political parties' in the same period. The paradigmatic place of the histories of Florence and Venice is one of the causes of the perspectival distortion. Between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries, Florence and Venice developed two distinct models of republican self-government, 'popular' the former, aristocratic the latter. The case of Genoa may be the most complex and best documented instance of a model of party system that several other communities adopted in late medieval Italy. The juncture between political parties and electoral procedures is a crucial locus where the complexity and resilience of a political system can be gauged.
