The governing parties of the Italian ‘First Republic’ all participated in the corrupt and clientelistic exploitation of state resources for electoral and organizational advantage, and their disintegration in the 1990s was in large part a consequence of the exhaustion of those resources. However, the rearrangement of the centre-right under Silvio Berlusconi’s leadership can be interpreted in similar terms. Although unlike its predecessors in a number of respects, Forza Italia’s organizational strategy until now has been similarly heavily reliant on the capture, or prospective capture, of state power. This paper will argue that the way in which Italian parties (particularly those of the centre-right) have organized and financed their activities has been conditioned by their inability or reluctance to construct mass party organizations based on ideologically motivated party membership. The absence of such voluntary activism presents parties with a set of dilemmas, which can be resolved in a number of ways. The common feature of parties which lack voluntary activists is their need to channel state resources, or at least the promise of state resources, into the party organization. The paper outlines a simple rational choice model of party organization, drawing on Mancur Olson’s well-known theory of collective action, which suggests how party organizers can overcome a shortage of voluntary activism, and illustrates the implications of these organizational dynamics for party behaviour. It then analyzes the organization and behaviour of three Italian parties, the Christian Democrats (DC), Socialists (PSI) and Forza Italia (FI), through the prism of this model. I will suggest that although their organizational structures are formally quite different, these parties have developed predictable organizational responses to the same problem of extensive ‘free-riding’ amongst their core constituencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]