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POLITICAL PROFESSIONALISM IN ITALY | 111

name and became much leaner, following the general process of secularisation and the
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weakening of mass parties .Hundreds of party employees were fired.
Moreover, there have been changes to the electoral laws that have introduced a more
personalised campaign and, therefore, the need for each single candidate to be
supported beyond the help that party apparatuses, weakened as they were, could
ensure. These changes have affected both the national and the local elections. At the
level of national elections, a prevalent majoritarian system has replaced the
proportional system, introducing competition based on single individual figures,
whereas, in the past, electoral competition was based almost entirely on party
affiliation. At the local level the direct election of mayors, and then of regional
governors, was also introduced. One consequence of these changes is that candidates
themselves now have to provide an election team previously made available through
party structures. Furthermore, direct elections have opened the way to candidates from
outside the world of politics and who have even more need of personal electoral teams.

Although traditional party professionals have not completely disappeared as a result of
these changes, their numbers have diminished and their role has been transformed.
Their traditional communication functions, derived from being at the centre of diffused
and widely spread networks of interpersonal communication, or from being in charge
of means of communication heavily dependent on or linked to the party, are now
performed by the mass media system acting essentially on the basis of commercial
logic. The exigencies deriving from the increased role of the mass media system have
produced the birth of a new kind of political professionalism that is essentially linked to
an array of communication tasks and skills that are the main topic of this chapter.

These changes affect both the normal, everyday political process and the specific
period of campaigning. As to the former, all government and political institutions have
been forced to assume an organisational structure, based on professional skills and
principles, whose aim is to interact with the increased role of the mass media within the
new structure of the public sphere.This point is dealt with more fully in the section on
centralisation and news management. On the other hand, the disappearance of many
of the old party apparatuses, together with changes in the electoral system, have
increased the need for particular skills and professional figures who are able to perform
the tasks once performed by bureaucrats in the party structure during the election
campaign.

CENTRALISATION AND NEWS MANAGEMENT Political Professionalism in Italy
As is well known, news management is not a new attitude of government and all other
institutions playing some role in the public arena. It started with the advent of the mass
media system itself and with its increased role in shaping public attitudes. In his classic
book, Discovering the News, Michael Schudson has clearly shown how news
management began in the US around 1920 (Schudson, 1978). In Italy, too, news 113