Abstract

The article examines the issue of intra-party democracy in the most recent Italian experience, disentangling the multiple and difficult relationships between individuals and party structures in representative, party democracy. Citizens can be supporters or voters; they can run as candidates or be elected as office representatives. These different scenarios of how individual citizens and political parties interact and, in turn, whether and to what extent party democracy is consistent with democracy within parties must be examined in the broader context of parties’ rapid, and chaotic changes and their turning into liquid, unstable organizations. At the general level, a rapidly changing political landscape has determined an unclear and fractured legal framework, where different judgments, legislations, and internal rules blossom and often clash; in the specific context of Italy, these tensions reveal the overall weakness of Italian political parties (also in light of the rise and success of populist parties that weaponize calls for intra-party democracy) and the apparently insurmountable difficulties of the Italian Constitution in regulating the internal life of parties that inhabit Italy’s party democracy.