The lack of financial resources is an often-cited hurdle for women pursuing political careers. However, empirical analysis of the dynamics of the private funding of women candidates and its potential implications for their political careers is still scant, particularly for countries outside the anglophone regions. This paper contributes to the scholarly debate by focusing on the gendered patterns in campaign fundraising in Italy, where radical changes to the party funding regime and multiple reforms to the electoral laws may have changed the structure of opportunity for fundraising by women candidates. We analyse patterns of private funding for men and women candidates in four national elections between 1996 and 2018. Our analysis, triangulated with semi-structured interviews with women candidates, shows that differences exist in fundraising patterns between male and female candidates in Italy. It reveals differences in the quality of candidates’ fundraising networks and confirms that political affiliation (to right-wing parties) and incumbency have an effect on the amount of donations received, thus granting women candidates greater access to private donations.

The study of interest groups and their role in political life has undergone somewhat of a renaissance in recent years. Long standing scholarly themes such as interest groups influence mobilization, formation, and 'bias', are being addressed using new and novel data sets and methods. There are also new and exciting themes, such as digital activism, the role of ICTs in enabling collective action and the growth of global advocacy networks, are being added. Contemporary debates about the role of commercial lobbyists and professionalized interest representation are also highly salient. Together, they draw an ever larger and broader constituency to the study of interest groups and advocacy. This series seeks to capture both new generation studies addressing long standing themes in new ways and innovate scholarship posing new and challenging questions that emerge in a rapidly changing world. The series encourages contributions from political science (but also abutting disciplines such as public policy and governance, economics, law, history, international relations and sociology) that speak to these themes. It welcomes work undertaken at the level of sub-national, national and supra-national political systems, and particularly encourages comparative or longitudinal studies. The series is open to diverse methodologies and theoretical approaches. The book series will sit alongside and complement the Interest Groups & Advocacy journal.

This article investigates the dimension and evolution of the financing of political parties. It focuses on 28 parties in the five major European countries (Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain), analysing the parties’ budgets from 2002 to 2016. The article's assessment shows that the availability of funds increased until the beginning of the Great Recession (2008), and then decreased, mainly due to a decline in public support for parties. Diminished state generosity has led parties to look for different sources of financing: the article shows the proportion of self-funding resources in terms of membership fees and private donations that has sustained the parties’ finances. Finally the article presents a model that helps to explain the shrinking of parties’ income by including parties’ ideological alignment, electoral outcome, presence in government and share of public financing, and countries’ public spending and GDP level, to investigate the plausible causes of the reduction of parties’ income.

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