Suchergebnisse

Literature devoted to party organizations rarely relies on Organization Theory. With the exception of the fundamental contribution by Panebianco, which dates back to 1982, limited efforts have been made towards a mutual contamination between the study of party organizational development and the vast body of theories, approaches and analytical frameworks that crowd Organization Theory. Moreover, while Organization Theory has recently paid attention to the study of political parties, party scholars are still committed to accumulating empirical knowledge or, at best, elaborating ideal-typical models. The aim of this contribution is to favour a cross-fertilization between these two literatures, by building on the premises of organizational institutionalism and on the organizations as multi-dimensional rational open systems perspective. Despite our effort is primarily conceptual, our arguments are conceived to be properly translated into empirical observations.

Focus on the Italian case: Italy abolished state subsidies to political parties, making it one of only two members of the European Union to not provide public funding. Since 1974 Italy has seen fragmented legislative initiatives and continuous amendments, instead of comprehensive reform.

Nel corso degli ultimi anni, i concetti di "programmazione" e "valutazione" delle politiche pubbliche hanno ricevuto una particolare attenzione tanto da parte della comunità scientifica che delle istituzioni. Attraverso di essi, infatti, è andata progressivamente diffondendosi una nuova e più articolata visione dei processi di policy making, imperniata sul valore strategico di una programmazione quanto più possibile integrata e coerente e sulla necessità di condurre una verifica costante degli interventi, lungo l'intero ciclo vitale delle singole politiche. La presente indagine conoscitiva, condotta dall'IRPET per conto della VII Commissione Vigilanza del Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, si propone di affrontare alcune di queste tematiche specifiche, sia attraverso un'analisi dei livelli di integrazione esistenti tra i differenti strumenti di programmazione operanti sul territorio, sia mediante una ricognizione dei sistemi di valutazione impiegati per la verifica degli interventi finanziati attraverso i Fondi Strutturali.

Le politiche di sviluppo locale costituiscono un policy domain in costante evoluzione: la centralità della dimensione locale dello sviluppo socioeconomico è stata acquisita da tempo dall'Unione Europea quale opzione strategica da perseguire attraverso la progressiva attribuzione, alle regioni, delle competenze in materia di programmazione, nella cornice più ampia dei principi che ispirano la politica comunitaria di coesione sociale ed economica. Tra questi principi rilevano, in particolare, quello della collaborazione istituzionale tra i diversi livelli in cui si articola il sistema di governance europeo e il principio della concertazione e del dialogo sociale tra il complesso degli attori coinvolti nella formulazione, nell'implementazione e su cui ricadono gli effetti delle politiche. Il presente lavoro si propone di tratteggiare i contorni delle strategie di sviluppo locale delineatesi in Toscana attraverso procedure concertative: lo scopo è quello di verificare quanto la legge regionale 29 Luglio 1998, n. 41 Incentivazione e sostegno dei programmi locali di sviluppo sostenibile quale "metodo di lavoro", sia stata capace di diffondere il principio e il valore strategico della programmazione concertata all'interno del territorio regionale.

AbstractThe aim of this contribution is twofold: first, to verify empirically how and to what extent party organizations vary within countries, in time; second, to enhance the role of political factors in explaining organizational variance. While mainstream literature has generally overestimated cross-national party convergence, a renewed interest in the study of variance has recently gained ground. We thus focus on seven European countries, from 1990 to 2010, by combining party organizational data from the Party Organization Data Handbook and the Political Party Database Project, with domestic cultural, socioeconomic, technological data from the European Values Survey and the World Bank, as well as supranational economic data provided by the OECD. We are interested in verifying how much of the variance in party organizations can be explained by resorting to the parameters of the party systems vis-à-vis domestic and supranational extra-political factors. Our results show that the explanatory power of party systems' parameters is stronger than the predictive ability of contextual variables.

AbstractThe relationships between the State and political parties have often been analysed in dual terms. Yet, as Katz and Mair already noticed in their well-known (and criticized) article on the emergence of the cartel party, a clear separation between parties and public institutions has never been completely achieved, in the evolution of liberal democracies. In contrast, while parties act as agencies of institutionalization, public institutions recognize (de jure or de facto) parties as the legitimate actors of political representation. From this perspective, it is worth considering party change as a process intertwined also with institutional change. To date, however, the analysis of such a relationship has been neglected by political scientists, who have privileged explanations of party change based on other factors, whether at systemic or at a micro level. By avoiding a priori assumptions about causality, our main research question is the following: is it possible to identify patterns of co-evolution between State institutions – more specifically, public administration – and party organizations? Building on a new institutional approach to organization theory, the aim of this article is to investigate to what extent the evolution in the size of party organizations and in the size of public administration has followed similar trajectories. Our study focuses on the United Kingdom and Italy, from 1950 to 2010. Our findings confirm that parties' external face expands when public spending and the number of public employees increase, and vice-versa. The same holds for parties' internal face, at least in the Italian case.

Le elezioni per il rinnovo della Giunta e del Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, tenutesi il 31 Maggio 2015, meritano di essere analizzate con attenzione. In primo luogo perché i cittadini toscani sono stati chiamati a votare con una nuova legge elettorale che ha introdotto alcune significative modifiche rispetto al passato, nel quadro più ampio della riforma dello Statuto Regionale. In secondo luogo, perché agli elementi di continuità "strutturale", di lungo periodo, del voto toscano si sono assommate anche novità di non poco conto: in particolare, una evidente diminuzione della partecipazione elettorale e, soprattutto, un riallineamento degli equilibri tra le forze politiche, con l'affermazione della Lega Nord come secondo partito in regione. Si tratta, in entrambi casi, di fenomeni che hanno accomunato tutte le regioni della cosiddetta "cintura rossa", dove i dati sull'astensione si sono presentati omogenei (con il picco rappresentato dall'Emilia Romagna) e dove la Lega Nord ha raddoppiato i propri consensi rispetto alle elezioni del 2010.

In the last 20 years an increasing number of scholars have centred their attention on the relationships between party national structures and party sub-national branches. A relevant part of the specialized literature has interpreted party change as the by-product of the denationalization of party politics. The aim of this contribution is to investigate to what extent eight relevant Italian parties have followed patterns of organizational change, after the reforms of the municipal, provincial and regional election sys-tems; and the process of devolution of administrative powers begun during the Nineties. By focusing on two analytical dimensions (the level of involvement and the level of autonomy of party regional units), we analyse diachronically continuity and change in party formal organization, through an in-depth analysis of the statutes adopted from 1992 to 2012

The aim of the present article is to assess the main aspects of the institutionalization of party politics at the European Union level. The Political Parties at European Level (PPELs) originated outside the European institutions and were basically, before the approval of Regulation 2004‑2003, transnational federations of national political parties. The introduction of public funding from the eu budget to the PPELs aimed to institutionalize and reinforce these organizations. However, the influence of ppels in the European political sphere is still limited. Two institutional and political changes – namely the approval of a new Statute for European Parties and the nomination of candidates for the Presidency of the EU Commission – have been implemented, but their consequences on the consolidation of PPELs still need to be verified empirically.