Speaker: Dott. Bruno Marino
Discussant: Piero Ignazi (Università di Bologna)
Brief description of the seminar: The reform of candidate and leader selection methods have been important innovations brought about by Western European political parties in the past few decades. Some scholars have also written about a growth in the Intra-Party Democracy (IPD) of the political formations affected by such reforms. Nonetheless, a clear and widely accepted way of defining and measuring IPD is still missing. In this paper, we propose a novel method to conceptualise and measure IPD. First, we put forward a minimalist definition of democracy within parties based on the regime-level definition of democracy. Second, we define three dimensions aiming at distinguishing among different types of minimally democratic parties, based on the selection of candidates for general elections, the selection of party leaders, and the way in which parties finance their activities.