From the Italian Communist Party to the Democratic Party. From the Labour Party to the New Labour. A Comparative Study of Two Processes of Identity Reconstruction

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of the processes of identity re-construction experienced by the British Labour Party and the Italian Communist Party between the late Seventies and the first decade of this century. By investigating the changes accomplished by such organizations, it also aims at comparing them in a wider perspective, namely the crisis and the neo-revisionist transformations which characterized many European left-wing parties. Building on the idea that relating two seemingly remote cases to each other cannot only be logically coherent but also heuristically useful (Most Different Systems Design, Landman 2000), it will examine how the two parties reacted in similar ways to common challenges, despite their sharp initial differences. With this in mind, it will attempt to fulfill three overall objectives, the first of which consists in determining the reasons which brought the party leaderships to pursue the change, and the modalities through which this happened. The purposes that leaders and elites had in mind, the resources they used, the strategies they conceived towards members and voters (to captivate the new or lost sympathizers and reassure the most conservative ones) will thus be carefully scrutinized. Secondly, this work will dwell on the analogies and differences that the parties developed throughout their identity rebuilding processes. Particular attention will be paid to the elements of continuity and discontinuity between the identity politics adopted by New Labour and the Italian PD and their preexisting collective identities. Finally, the last step will consist in the collocation of both the transitions in a broader context, such as the rise of new identity questions within the European Left, after the crisis of the social-democratic model and the historic turning point of 1989. Thereby, political identity will be addressed as a key factor to understand the causes and consequences of social change in politics.