Toward the personalisation of political financing in Italy? Private donations to candidates and parties: 1987 - 2013

Political financing has attracted lot of attention from scholars in recent decades due primarily to the predominant role of public money in the support of parties’ activities. Less attention has been paid to private donations because of the difficulties of finding reliable data and because of the lack of relevance attributed to party budgets. Nonetheless, the international literature suggests that private sources of money should not be neglected in political research because they can act as a strategic instrument enabling external donors directly to influence politics and politicians. In this article I will focus on the private donations declared by parties as organisations and by their candidates in various election years in order to establish whether there is a trend toward the personalisation of political financing involving increases in the attention paid by external donors to individual candidates rather than to party central organisations. The results produced by analysing three different election years – selected to enable the control of potentially confounding variables – and two different electoral arenas – the National Parliament and the European Parliament – show that while the amount of private money collected by parties is drastically decreasing over time, the amounts received by individual candidates follow a different path: the latter are attracting more and more donations and enlarging their personal networks of connections with civil society representatives, with substantial differences among political formations.