ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on new social pressures in the 1970s and forms of party activity and mobilisation; the changing situation of internal party factions; the problems of party reform or revival while remaining a governmental force; and the role of ideology and party identity in relation to new alliance formations. It demonstrates how different a kind of political party the DC is from the PCI. The direct bilateral comparison of the DC with the PCI is useful, for as the two mass parties in Italian politics they offer very different examples within that broad category. DC in general emerges near the opposite end of the pole from the PCI in being a catch-all rather than mass-structured party and one which is pragmatic rather than ideological, voter rather than class-oriented and loose-associational in its internal relationships. The principal occasion generating the DC's socio-political crisis of identity, linked as this was to the ambiguity of its la.
