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The author examines both structurally and functionally the General Confederation of Italian Industry, Italian Catholic Action, the Christian Democrats, the Italian Liberal Party, the monarchist Italian Republican Party, the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement, and many more interest groups. The book is based on several years of field research in Italy, including interviews with scores of political figures, bureaucrats, and interest group leaders. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

David Apter, with whom, sixty years ago, I enrolled in the graduate program of Princeton University's department of politics, died on May 4 of this year. Along with other graduate students of that era, we shared the conceit that we would change the ways in which the discipline went about doing comparative politics. The moment for striking out in that direction seemed propitious. World War II had introduced countless Americans, among them many future political scientists, to "exotic" countries where political institutions and behavior appeared quite unlike anything they had learned in their undergraduate courses. War itself led to an explosion of interest in nation-reforming in the case of defeated totalitarian systems, and nation-building in those parts of the world where empires were breaking up.

Several generalizations about political parties that appear in the symposium volume, Political Parties and Political Development (1966), seem to be equally valid 40 years later, while some others do not. The decline of the political party as perhaps the chief instrument for integrating previously excluded groups into political participatory modes was already apparent then. Similarly, it was predictable that universal suffrage and elections would not necessarily lead to democracy. Less apparent back then was that a proliferation of political parties would both reflect and also radically change the cleavage structure of society and, consequently, attenuate the tendency of parties and party systems to 'freeze' into predictable and enduring patterns. Above all, it was not imagined that revolutionary technological changes of the past several decades would so profoundly affect the nature of elections, and the role of political parties in them, as to raise disturbing questions regarding the future of representative democratic polities.