Challenging the party system: The Five Star Movement in comparative perspective
The Italian Five Star Movement (FSM) represents one of the most significant party political innovations of recent decades. Launched officially in 2009, the FSM had originally come into being a few years before as a group of followers of the comedian Beppe Grillo—resembling something between a fan club and a web marketing experiment. Its results in its first competitive national elections in 2013 represented one of the most stunning European electoral success stories of the post-war period, becoming the largest party in the Italian party system. In 2018 it entered government as part of a ‘populist’ coalition with the more right-wing League, an experiment that was replaced, a year later, by a coalition between the FSM and the centre-left Democratic Party. Success has not just been registered at the national level, moreover, as the FSM has had its candidates elected as the mayors of several cities, including Rome, Turin and Parma.
The significance of the FSM, however, goes beyond its electoral successes. The party has introduced innovations in political language and leadership style, through its unusual duo, Beppe Grillo, the voice onstage, and Gianroberto Casaleggio, the web marketing entrepreneur behind the scenes. The party’s innovative organizational model, heavily relying on online tools, has also been scrutinized by political scientists and communication experts alike. The eclectic ideological profile allowing the party to switch alliances from a far right to a centre-left government partner within weeks is also remarkable, as is its original and somewhat random pattern of political elite recruitment.
This has led political scientists to wonder whether the FSM is an isolated and possibly short-lived experiment which will be forgotten in a few years, or the harbinger of a veritable transformation of party politics that will affect the rest of Europe and beyond.
In the present collection, we gather several contributions exploring the FSM from different points of view: its electorate, ideological flexibility, European alliances, and the effectiveness of its original organizational solutions to address the problem of party legitimacy. Some of these contributions focus on the party as a case study, others frame their analyses in a comparative perspective. We believe they represent important contributions to the debate on the challenges contemporary party systems face, of which the Five Star Movement represents one of the most powerful examples.
Research Article
Love, convenience, or respectability? Understanding the alliances of the Five Star Movement in the European Parliament
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- Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica / Volume 49 / Issue 1 / 2019
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- 30 April 2018, pp. 25-48
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Tracing the electorate of the MoVimento Cinque Stelle: an ecological inference analysis
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- Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica / Volume 47 / Issue 1 / March 2017
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- 08 November 2016, pp. 45-62
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The failure of mainstream parties and the impact of new challenger parties in France, Italy and Spain
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- Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica / Volume 51 / Issue 1 / 2021
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- 27 August 2020, pp. 100-116
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Where the wind blows: Five Star Movement’s populism, direct democracy and ideological flexibility
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- Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica / Volume 48 / Issue 1 / March 2018
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- 06 November 2017, pp. 109-132
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The odd couple: analyzing United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and Italian Five Stars Movement’s (FSM’s) European Union (EU)-opposition in the European Parliament (EP)
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- Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica / Volume 48 / Issue 2 / July 2018
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- 21 November 2017, pp. 197-220
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Breaking the cartel: the geography of the electoral support of new parties in Italy and Spain
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- Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica / Volume 46 / Issue 2 / 2016
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- 25 April 2016, pp. 219-241
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