National Party Delegates

The paper presents the state of the art of the national party delegates research tradition in Italy. National party delegates are not just simply party members, but activists with a long political militancy. In many cases, these are people with a certain social visibility, thanks to organizational or elective positions in politics and local-level associations, and therefore, frequently, pivotal members of the civic and party communities. Hence they are figures who can shed light not only in the relationship between parties and society, but also on the Italian parties’ transformations. This article summarizes the principal publications on national party delegates from the seventies-eighties (based on the date-set produced by the EPPMLE - European Political Parties Middle Level Elites - Project of the European Election Study) until the 2000s publications based on data-set produced by the “Italian Observatory on the Transformations of Political Parties”.