Mobilization, Social Movements and Party Recruitment: The Italian Communist Party since the 1960s

Abstract

Political life in the advanced industrial democracies since the Second World War has been characterized by periods of mass mobilization and protest followed by years of relative quiescence and institutional dominance. The individual phases have prompted extensive reflection. Far less attention, however, has been devoted to how developments in one phase might influence the subsequent one. Using data from a 1979 survey of activists of the Italian Communist Party, this article examines how the cycle of protest which swept Italy in the late-1960s and early-1970s was reflected in the distribution of attitudes towards dissent within the different generations of party activists. Our findings clearly suggest that participation in social movements had independent effects on the presence of particular tolerance attitudes and that phases of mobilization affect the distribution of politically salient attitudes among party activists during a subsequent phase of institutionalization. This, in turn, has possible implications for processes of change in the Italian political system.

Neo-fascist or revolutionary leftist: Family politics and social movement choice in postwar Italy

“…Aiming to create a student-worker revolutionary front, the extra-parliamentary left turned schools, offices, factories and neighbourhoods into sites of conflict and recruitment. It also disowned the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI) as authoritarian and a pillar of the country's political system (Della Porta, 1995;Della Porta and Tarrow, 1986;Lange et al, 1990;Moss, 1989).…”

Comparison, Triangulation, and Embedding Research in History: A Methodological Self-Analysis

“…With della Porta, I had theorized that there was an interactive relationship between these two apparently opposing trends: as large numbers of "68ers" left the streets for more institutional forms of participation, those who remained were the most militant and adopted increasingly radical forms of action (della Porta and Tarrow, 1986). While della Porta had documented the second part of this bifurcation (1995), with Peter Lange and Cynthia Irvin, I documented the first part for the thousands of veterans of the 1968 period who moved into the ranks of the Communist party (Lange et al, 1989).…”

“…I thought that case studies of particular sectors could help, so I devoted separate chapters to students, workers, and to a dissident Catholic group in Florence, where I interviewed participants who had occupied a local church in a working-class district (1989: chs. 5-7).…”

“Il coraggio di essere giovani”: un progetto sulla Fgci di Modena degli anni Ottanta

“…In particolare, il Pci fu notoriamente restio a instaurare un dialogo con i movimenti nati dal 1968, anche se proprio la lunga stagione di mobilitazione aperta dai movimenti portò poi, nell'arco dei successivi otto anni, a un consistente spostamento verso sinistra dell'elettorato più giovane, di cui i comunisti cominciarono a beneficiare già con le elezioni del 1972 [Barbagli e Corbetta 1980, 485]. Questa influenza positiva fu percepita anche a livello organizzativo, e, nonostante non si possa parlare di vera e propria "confluenza" dei movimenti nel Pci, il ciclo di proteste degli anni Settanta rappresentò indubbiamente il contesto di formazione dell'ultima grande nuova generazione di militanti comunisti, che raggiunse numeri paragonabili a quelli del dopoguerra [Hellman 1980;Lange, Irvin e Tarrow 1990]. Tuttavia, il Partito comunista si dimostrò infine incapace di consolidare il consenso ottenuto in questo periodo, e questo momento di scambio favorevole con le generazioni più giovani si arrestò bruscamente alla fine degli anni Settanta, in coincidenza con la più ampia crisi che aveva investito il Pci dopo il fallimento del progetto del compromesso storico.…”