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7

Political Professionalism in Italy

Paolo Mancini

OLD AND NEW POLITICAL PROFESSIONALISM IN ITALY
There has been an abundance of political professionalism, in the Weberian sense, in
Italy for years. It was inextricably linked with the mass political parties that were so
important in this country up to a very few years ago. They were able to survive
throughout recent Italian history, including during the Fascist dictatorship, thanks to
the existence of a very high number of party bureaucrats who represented their
backbone. Both the Christian Democrat party and the Communist party (together with
smaller parties such as Partito Socialista or the right-wing party Movimento Sociale)
took their strength and their capacity to affect many different parts of Italian society
from the everyday work of thousands of party employees who, to use Weber’s words
‘were living for politics and from politics’: their main skill was politics itself. They
understood perfectly the party apparatus, and very often they were at the top of a
network of interpersonal communications that allowed them to control the party
decision making process and the gathering of consensus in support of party policies.
Their role as agents of socialisation and ‘living beings’ in the processes of
communication was essential to the party: they spread the voice of the party, they were
used to find new members and to identify those who were already persuaded. They
were the quintessential identification of what Farrel calls the ’labour intensive
campaign’ (Farrel, 1996), that is a campaign, and therefore a political debate and Political Professionalism in Italy
struggle, organised thanks to either the free or paid support of thousands and
thousands of party activists. In his own work on party bureaucrats, Mastropaolo, who
has adopted Weber’s insights, has argued that their main function was that of
‘mobilisation’, that is: spreading consensus, looking for public support, advocacy in
favour of particular ideological ends, and social and economical interests. (Mastropaolo,
1986). 111