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"Political analysts have more of an amateur interest in political phenomena while political scientists study them using the scientific method, i.e. basing their analyses and hypotheses on verifiable empirical data. However, today insisting on this distinction in the public debate can be a little deceptive."

Telos: You are often called a ‘political analyst’, and unlike academics, many people don’t really know what this is. What does a political analyst do?

Piero Ignazi: The term ‘political analyst’ entered journalism jargon 10 or 15 years ago and creates a little confusion. Anyone who writes about politics, whether they are a philosopher or anything else, is called a political analyst, overlooking the fact that a branch of studies actually exists called ‘Political Science’. However, although there were many illustrious political scientists in Italy in the early history of the discipline at the beginning of the 20th century, like Gaetano Mosca and Wilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels, the first person to empirically analyse political parties, political science had to work hard to be recognised after World War II as an independent discipline. There are many reasons for this: ranging from most of Italian culture’s hostility to the empirical sciences, starting with the idealism of Benedetto Croce, to the exploitation that fascism made of it when it inaugurated the 'Fascist Faculty of Political Science' in Perugia. Giovanni Sartori introduced modern Political Science, according to now universally accepted disciplinary standards, into Italian universities when he was hired as the first Political Science Professor in 1959 and the first tenured Professor in 1966. Since then, Political Science has taken its place within the academic landscape and rose to the forefront internationally with the generation following Sartori, the baby-boomer generation. This premise was necessary to point out the difference between ‘political analysts’ and ‘political scientists.’ Political analysts have more of an amateur interest in political phenomena while political scientists study them using the scientific method, i.e. basing their analyses and hypotheses on verifiable empirical data. However, today insisting on this distinction in the public debate can be a little deceptive. So, even people like me, with the professional background of a political scientist, are often called political analysts like other (brilliant) colleagues of mine who however have an entirely different educational background in history, philosophy, law or sociology.

In the 2000s, even though there has been discussion about how the death of ideology has distanced the new generations from political activism, post-ideological parties that are light and liquid have been spoken of in positive terms.
However, today, the impression is that a growing number of citizens have a hard time even understanding the sense and usefulness of politics. As you see it, does politics have a future? And is it realistic to think that parties, that are sound, structured and rooted in society and the local areas, will re-emerge?

Today, political parties are much different from what we are used to, i.e. the mass parties of the 20th century. The conditions that gave rise to the formation and complete development of those types of parties disappeared starting in the early ‘80s. At that time, the transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial society, secularisation, the spread of consumption and the new media, the emergence of priorities connected to quality of life and personal self-realisation led to a transformation both of the internal dynamics of parties and to their relationship with society. In an extreme nutshell, party leadership was becoming more and more autonomous, parties’ connection to an ideology or a specific area of society (the working class or faith-based) was becoming looser and looser, many different interest groups were emerging and parties’ membership base was shrinking. The pace of this change began to pick up over the subsequent decades. Then, the invasive spread first of the media and now of the internet, economic restructuring under the banner of neo-liberalism and labour fragmentation and, finally, the liquidity of social relationships (less frequent and fleeting, no longer linked to sound associative structures) put the activities of political parties, as they were conceived in their early history, on the ropes. Whereas first they were a tool of political participation, mobilisation and socialisation/education, a place for the ‘recognition of equals’ who share the same values and a bond of ‘common political identity’, now they have mainly become a place to select people aspiring to public office. The discussion, the shared, collective elaboration of political choices has given way to centring people’s efforts on elections. Parties are no longer a gathering place where people interact with others, share values and work toward a common goal. Instead, they are a springboard to a career. And this is pushing parties away from the public sentiment.

What are the prospects for the European socialist parties now that, at the end of the age of Blair, people don’t seem to be interested in a return to the programmes and languages of social democracy (full employment, the social state)?

Socialist parties are at a historic crossroads and, if I may be blunt, risk being fatally marginalised like their historic opponents: the liberals and Christian Democrats. The basic reason is simple. They have lost their mission, which was to defend the underprivileged members of society.
The socialist parties represented the popular classes and clashed with the representatives of the more wealthy classes. There was a clear conflict of interests.
All this is now gone, in part because, as I said before, industrial society, with its well-defined classes, has vanished and in part because the turn-of-the-century change in the economy (and society) favoured the wealthy classes. The class struggle is over, and the workers lost. They hung in there until the early 2000s because they compensated for the loss in popular consensus with the backing of the new educated, urbanised middle classes that had become closer to the socialists, not because of their interests but because they shared many of the “human” values specific to the old socialist tradition. But in recent years, a lot of underprivileged electors have started to flee and feed the populist powers. Managing to win back these voters without losing the neo-bourgeoisie newcomers is a very difficult challenge for the socialists.

One issue we think has been handled in a demagogical way is the public financing of political parties. What are your thoughts on this?

Political parties have been more generously financed and less controlled in Italy than anywhere else in the world. Then, after another wave of scandals, in early 2010, the pressure of public opinion became so great that they eliminated all State contributions for political parties. And now we are the only ones in Europe, along with Switzerland, that do not publically finance its parties. Anti-party demagoguery has surpassed all reason, and instead of establishing effective rules to combat corruption and misuse of public funds and reasonably reducing the cornucopia of money handed out in the last years, all public backing was cut.
It’s time Italy restored some rules regarding public financing that are in line with other European democracies.

Marco Sonsini