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IntroduzioneAfter sharing, through its various steps of evolution, the form and status of a corporate body, the party organization is falling prey to the virus of personalization, which is invading so many realms of contemporary life. Italy provides the clearest example of this cross-national trend with Silvio Berlusconi's personal party. As a media tycoon and one of the wealthiest men in the world, Berlusconi could rely on a skilled professional apparatus as well as on huge financial means to set up, in a few months, a vote-generating machine and become a Prime Minister. His party model has been widely imitated, by both center-right and center-left organizations, with variations and deviations. This article presents an overview of the development of personal parties in Italy and an analytical framework based on Max Weber's types of personal power.

The record of the last twenty years shows that most of the hopes put in the Second republic have been betrayed. Rather than a two party system reproducing the Westminster model, Italy has nurtured two highly fragmented coalitions, which have, in the latest national elections, been outplayed by a third pole, the protest movement of Beppe Grillo. The result is a tri-polar system, where a parliamentary majority can only be obtained by pulling together two bitterly antagonistic parties, with very little, if any, governmental stability. This article explains why the Second Republic failed to meet the expectations of the reform movement which strived to set Italian politics on a better track. It outlines how the main features of the emerging regime -the so-called Third republic- reflect, as it is often the case, the legacies of the previous one.

Personal power has been thus far a taboo to academic political science. It forces us to reconsider many of our basic assumptions. It shakes the very foundations of orthodox democratic theory. The new century and, for that matter, the new millennium is one where personal power will dictate new rules and new directions. Leaders of today's democracies have access to a tremendous amount of resources: financial, communicational, institutional. They do so through legitimate democratic channels, which makes for a clear-cut difference from all sorts of dictators that political systems have experimented in the past. And they may enjoy extraordinary levels of popularity, in what often becomes a direct relationship with the electorate. The amount of personal power a democratic leader can today accumulate is thus unprecedented. Yet this rise of personal power is not the result of a deviation, a deliberate deviation from the ordinary regime. Personalization of politics, much more than an individual choice, has become a structural and systemic element of contemporary politics.

Describes Italy as an "ideal type" for the presidentialization of a political system. Although the changing role of the state has contributed to the presidentialization of Italy's political system, greater attention is given to the crucial role played by the deterioration of traditional social cleavage politics & the media's proactive campaign for institutional reform. Although these elements came to a head during the 1990s, the process toward presidentialization has been under way in the executive arena for more than 20 years. The gradual strengthening of the executive; the emergence of prime ministerial dominance; the movement for electoral reform; & the shift from a partified to a presidentialized polity are described. A stronger executive, together with a media-dominated political arena & the new electoral law, resulted in a majoritarian form of politics that was unlike anything the reformers expected. However, it is concluded that the trend towards presidentialization in Italy does not necessarily indicate that a definite regime change has occurred. Prospects for the future are discussed. 40 References. J. Lindroth