Tigri di carta. Debolezza dei partiti e instabilita’ sistemica in Italia (1994–2018) by Eugenio Pizzimenti, Pisa, Pisa University Press, 2020, 267 pp. 268, €19.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-88-3339-361-3

Abstract

The book seeks to give a comprehensive overview of the organizational approach to the study of political parties by examining changes in Italian politics during the past 30 years. The author ’ s goal in this work is to synthesize his extensive study of political organizations and the evolution of the Italian party system. The book ’ s goal is to combine organizational theory with the literature and empirical research relating to political party organizational change. For researchers, the organizational viewpoint is a crucial theoretical approach for understanding how political parties work. The importance of adopting a consistent and comprehensive perspective from an organizational standpoint was recently shown in the Political Party Database Project (see Scarrow, Poguntke, and Webb 2017), to which the author contributed. Primarily, the author aims to develop a formal organizational theory of political parties that blends neo-institutionalism with a multidimensional approach to empirical study. Tigri di Carta is an in-depth presentation and discussion of that comparative organizational approach to the study of the political parties applied to the never-ending transformations of Italy ’ s collective political actors, offering an innovative and original contribution to the ways in which scholars can understand and empirically adopt the organizational perspective. Pizzimenti initially clarifies the role of political parties, leaving little room for (mis-)interpret-ation: parties are defined as ‘ formalised physical and social structures, created as an attempt to achieve specific goals, through the collaboration and space-temporal coordination of participants, using appropriate technical instruments and exchanging resources with the environment in which they operate ’ (p. 28). The