Back to the Ground. But which is the Ground? Modernizing strategies of financing and the legitimacy bases of political parties in western Europe.

Political parties must be legitimate in order to operate as agents of citizens' interests. Historically, the political legitimacy of mass party organisations was heavily dependent on their large membership base. As is generally known, since the mid-1960s, the organisational model has collapsed, becoming more state-oriented than citizen-oriented (Kirchheimer 1966). (Katz and Mair 1995). In times of political instability, membership and party loyalty have fallen, leading in the rise of alternative forms of partisanship and civil society representation (see Scarrow, Poguntke and Webb 2017, Bolleyer 2020). This paper looks at partisanship and civil society interests from a different perspective: the financial one. Financial resources have long been considered for their perceptive power and the public dependence of parties, particularly in European democracies. Private contributors, on the other hand, will help us comprehend the legitimacy foundation of the public political actor. Recent changes in the way politics is structured have resulted in digitalization as a kind of modernisation for both old and new political players. This paper focuses on the adaption process and analyses how political parties in Western countries connect to the web-society and their digital fundraising strategies. Taking into account the major European countries' political parties, the disparities between old (mainstream) organisations and new (more digitalized) players appear to be less striking than imagined. However, the new fundraising tactics pose serious concerns about the legitimacy of political parties and the amount of transparency that they enjoy now.