Choosing party leaders in Italy between personalization and democratization

This chapter provides an examination of political party leadership selection in Italy since the collapse of the ‘first party system’ in the early 1990s. In particular, it analyses the consequences of different types of leadership selection for the characteristics, the quality and the degree of turnover of the main Italian political elite. From this vantage point, the Italian political landscape, with its huge variety of party models and methods of leadership election, offers a unique opportunity to examine in-depth whether and to what extent different pathways to power within political parties affect the elite behaviour as well as the socio-demographic features of the party leaders. Among the issues examined are how leaders have been chosen, the factors that result in parties changing their selection rules, the types of leaders chosen and, particularly, the impact that different types of leadership selection have had on the characteristics of Italian political elite. More specifically, the chapter analyses the procedures and the results of the leadership selection in the most important political parties during the last twenty years: Left, ecology and freedom (Lef), Democratic Party (PD), Five Star Movement (F5M), People of Freedom/Go Italy (Pof) and the right-wing Northern League (NL).