Disintermediation in New and Mainstream Parties: Myth or Reality?

The growth of dissatisfaction and distrust of citizens towards the institutions of representative democracy and, above all, the political parties is a phenomenon that affected many European democracies in the last decades. As a consequence, citizens seem often to prefer direct and disintermediated forms of political action or to support new or radical parties. At the same time, however, the political parties themselves can resort to forms of disintermediation, introducing disruptive or, on the contrary, sustainable innovations, thus transforming their organizational models in order to increase their own legitimacy. In particular, according to the literature, it is possible to identify two kinds of disintermediation within party organizations: the first implies an increasingly important role of the leader; the second determines the strengthening of the decision-making role of the party members. On the basis of these theoretical premises, the aim of the paper is to answer the following questions: what are the organizational innovations introduced by new parties or radical parties? Do they lead to forms of disintermediation or to new forms of mediation? And what are the reactions of traditional and mainstream parties? Is it possible to identify a "contagion effect" in the capacity of innovation? In order to answer these questions we propose a comparison between the main new and traditional parties in Spain, Italy, Greece and France. The analysis will focus on the organizational models of the parties (membership, structure, decision-making processes) and their electoral consent.