6 - MASS PARTIES AND CLIENTELISM IN FRANCE AND ITALY

Summary

We battle, but on our program. The Movement [Républicain Populaire, MRP] is not going to define itself by opportunistic positions, but by courageous positions. (MRP 1951)

But of all of them, the most thorough in every area of evil is surely Mr. Sebastiano Vincelli, who, notwithstanding his young age, has never known other weapons than those of pretense, blackmail, corruption, double play, calumny, [and] continual lying. … It is a fact that he is the main [person] responsible for the disaster of the [Democrazia Cristiana, DC] party in our province. (DC 1958)

Introduction

The consequence of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire's (MRP) abjuring of clientelism was electoral failure; the consequence of the Democrazia Cristiana's (DC) clientelism was also electoral failure. Evidently, clientelism can be a double-edged sword. The question for this chapter is why parties choose to wield it, and how. In analyzing the clientelist practices of two Western European Christian Democratic parties, Italy's DC and France's MRP, for the decade just after the end of World War II, it becomes apparent that the relative timing of bureaucratization and democratization alone – Martin Shefter's thesis (1994) – does not suffice to explain why Italy's DC opted to use clientelism while France's MRP chose not to. To account for their diverging strategies, we need to look at the situation in which these parties' leaders made their choices and at their primary goals.