Grillo's Personal Party. A Case Study of Organizational Leader­ship

The article will be divided into three parts. First, a brief history of the Five Stars Movement, a political party that obtained a very significant and unexpected success, 8,500,000 votes (25% of Italian voters), in national elections in February 2013. Second, an in depth analysis of its structure, looking at its leadership and membership. Despite its declared bottom-up organization, based on Grillo's blog, the 5StarsMovement is actually a top-down decision making process. Third, its communication style and channels. As well as in the early Nineties for Silvio Berlusconi, when parties again lost their monopoly, the media became decisive actors in the Italian political system. Grillo’s discovery of the web was not just an organizational turning point, but also a programmatic and even ideological one. I’ll conclude with some key research questions about a re-definition of today’s democracy in the light of the crucial –if not dangerous – shift from representative to direct democracy