The Italian Democratic Party at the Crossroad: Party Activism and the Middle-Level Élite

We examine the middle-level élite of the Italian Democratic Party (Partito democratico, PD) and its founding parties, Democrats of the Left (Democratici di Sinistra, DS) and The Daisy (La Margherita, DL), over fifteen years (2004–2019). Our original dataset on national delegates comes from 2373 questionnaires collected at eight national party congresses. Inspired by Whiteley and Seyd’s concepts of low and high-intensity participation, we evaluate the relative weight of the various types of incentive in the two (internal and external) forms of party activism. Party activism is central to understanding the profound cultural, organisational, and electoral crisis that has put the PD at a crossroad and has led current secretary Letta to call for a ‘Constituent Congress of the New PD’.