On 4 April 2017, Giovanni Sartori, a towering figure of international political science, the founder of contemporary Italian political science and a mordant political polemicist, passed away in Rome at the age of 93.

From the 1960s onwards, his prominent position in the upper ranks of international political science was firmly established with his first book on democracy (Democratic Theory, Reference Sartori1962). It was further confirmed with subsequent books such as Parties and Party Systems (1976) and the Theory of Democracy Revisited (Reference Sartori1987), book chapters such as ‘European political parties: the case of polarised pluralism’ (in La Palombara and Weiner (eds) Political Parties and Political Development, 1966) and articles such as ‘Concept misformation in comparative politics’ (American Political Science Review, 1970: 1033–1053).

His position in international political science was, at the same time, a rather particular one. On the one hand, Sartori openly recognised the leading role of American political science in the development and consolidation of a solid empirical discipline. Accordingly, his scientific works display an intense conversation with the contemporary ‘big names’ of American political science from Merriam to Key and Lasswell, from Almond to Dahl. His frequent visits to major North American universities were also a clear tribute to the academic status of these institutions of higher learning and back home in Italy and in Europe he was an uncompromising promoter of the renewal of the study of politics along the lines of this US model. On the other hand, Sartori never forgot to bring into this scientific debate his rich personal cultural background and a European perspective that American scholars often lacked. This meant, in particular, a solid philosophical and theoretical background, a deep knowledge of the classics of political thought and a readiness to criticise a certain degree of parochialism in American scholars – who were often too focused on the peculiarities of US political life to understand other political experiences – as well as to highlight the negative consequences that empirical research, if theoretically unguided, can have.

Throughout his long and productive scholarly career, Sartori’s writings show an unwavering concentration on two fundamental themes, one of substance, the other of a methodological nature. On the substantive side, democracy is the central theme running through a long series of books and articles. On the methodological side, the role of concept formation in scientific discourse was the object of some of his most sharp-witted contributions.

The negative experience with democracy of many European countries (among them Italy) during the first half of the twentieth century and the existential challenge posed to ‘western’ democracies in the first decades after World War II by the communist model and its pretended more ‘perfect’ model of democracy, combine to explain Sartori’s lasting interest in this theme. Sartori took an active part in the debate on the fundamentals of democracy opened by Schumpeter’s epoch-making book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942); a debate oriented towards clarifying the meaning and working of a democratic regime. In his two main books about democracy (Democratic Theory, Reference Sartori1962 and The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Reference Sartori1987), Sartori’s effort was devoted to articulating and clarifying the meaning of the democratic ideal and exploring the institutional and political mechanisms that enable an approximation to it in real life, on the one hand, and, on the other, to challenging the democratic nature of ‘other democracies’. In his analysis of democracy, Sartori proposes an intermediate path between ‘realist’ and ‘idealistic’ or ‘normative’ interpretations of democracy. Sartori fully shares a crucial element of the ‘realist’ view about democracy first expounded by Schumpeter, which recognises the crucial role played by elites and the competition among them and, consequently, rejects as naïve the purely ‘participatory’ models of democracy that were opposed to the Schumpeterian model. At the same time, he provides a more articulated view of this regime by incorporating powerful normative elements embodied in the concept of democracy. A particularly important aspect of his contribution to an empirical theory of (liberal) democracy is the in-depth discussion of both the ‘promotional’ role of democratic ideals and of the intrinsic limits to their full translation into reality. When it was published, the importance of this book was widely recognised, for example by Samuel Finer, who called it ‘the most important theoretical analysis of democracy since World War II’ and praised its ‘lucidity pierced every now and then by the author’s mordant wit and sense of irony’, or by Robert Dahl, who recommended it as ‘a vital, vigorous and distinguished contribution to democratic theory’ and expected it to remain relevant for readers of ‘a generation from now’.

The general discussion on democracy was closely complemented in Sartori’s work by his pioneering research on party systems. If the central mechanism of democracy is competition, and parties are the typical actors in this competitive game, then the conformation of the party system deserves special attention. Once more, Sartori occupied a central place in one of the crucial scientific debates of the time. After Duverger’s book on parties, the discussion had focused upon the merits of two-party systems and the demerits of multi-party systems. Sartori injected into this discussion a much broader view of the different types of party systems. The starting point of his analysis was the Italian case (and his preoccupation with the survival of its fragile democracy), in which a multi-party system was characterised also by strong ideological ‘polarisation’. Extending his analysis comparatively, Sartori’s contribution to the debate on party systems was to rearrange the typology of democratic party systems along three main types (two-party, moderate multi-partism and polarised multi-partism). An important aside to this was the discussion of non-competitive party systems and of the distinction between hegemonic party systems, in which a party exercises a dominant role over satellite parties, and predominant party systems, where repeated victories in competitive elections produce the ‘predominance’ of a party in governing.

Until recently, the disappearance of traditional communist and fascist anti-system parties seemed to have relegated the Sartorian analysis to merely historical relevance, but the recent surge in many countries of extremist parties unwilling to accept coalitions with mainstream parties (or rejected by the latter) suggests that the concept of polarised multi-partism (with its specific functional dynamics) has not lost its relevance.

The second main theme Sartori addressed repeatedly over the years concerns the role of concept formation in the realm of comparative political science. Starting with the article ‘Concept misformation in comparative politics’ (1970), Sartori recurrently alerted us to the risks (the ‘garbage in garbage out effect’) that sloppy conceptualisations combined with large-scale empirical data gathering can produce in comparative research. Sartori fully supported the drive towards comparative research which so strikingly characterised the renewal of political science in the post-World War II decades; he was aware, however, that data collection across countries cannot produce scientifically reliable results unless it starts from concepts which ‘are able to travel’ and avoids ‘concept stretching’. The importance of the contribution of Sartori in this field is testified by the continuing activity of the Committee on Conceptual and Terminological Analysis (COCTA) [now the Committee on Concepts and Methods (C&M)], which he helped to set up within the International Political Science Association.

In his long academic career, Sartori has collected a great number of prestigious prizes (among which in 2005 the Lifetime Achievement Award of ECPR) and honorary degrees; it is therefore a bit surprising that he was never awarded the Skytte Prize, often considered the ‘Nobel prize’ for political scientists.

While vigorously expressing his ideas on the international scientific arena, Sartori fought, almost singlehandedly, a battle in the Italian academic system to re-establish political science as a strong discipline. The promising beginnings of an Italian science of politics with Mosca, Pareto and Michels had been wiped out by fascism and by the strong opposition of other academic disciplines. In the 1960s, when he became the first professor of political science, Sartori found a desert. But he was soon at work to change this. As this period coincides with the beginning of my own academic career, I have a lasting memory of his efforts in this field. My first encounter with him, in 1969, is still impressed in my memory. I had just graduated from the law faculty of the University of Rome and was looking for a more empirical perspective than the study of comparative constitutional law. Sartori was in Rome for some reason and was recruiting young people for the research and teaching activities he was launching at the University of Florence. I had the opportunity to be interviewed by him; more than my knowledge of constitutional law, it was my readings of the classics of political thought, from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, which enabled me to face his tough scrutiny and opened the way to a temporary position in his ‘school’ for me. From January 1970, I could see him at work in what could be called the ‘creation’ of Italian political science and in the middle of his scholarly career. Into the rather traditional Italian faculties of political sciences (the plural then meant that political science as such was, in fact, absent or at best overshadowed by more well established disciplines such as history, constitutional law, sociology and political philosophy), Sartori injected a strong current of change, affirming that the empirical approach to the study of politics had to have a leading role.

In the early 1970s, he put in place, one after the other, the basic instruments for the formation of students and young scholars in the new (for Italy) discipline. With the support of American foundations, he established in Florence a research centre in which a small community of young scholars would collaborate in his research projects and develop their own. Using this centre, he established an informal doctoral programme for the training of graduates (the events of 1968 had blocked the introduction of PhD programmes in Italy and they were formally established only in 1980). The first group of Italian political scientists was born there. In 1970, he edited the first Italian text book for political science (Antologia di Scienza Politica), which was a collection of essays by the best names in international political science (Almond, Dahl, Deutsch, Eckstein, Huntington, Lipset and others), soon to be followed by a series of specialised handbooks on parties, elites and so on. In 1971, he launched the Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica (now Italian Political Science Review), conceived as an instrument to establish the ‘standards’ of good political science in Italy. And in 1973, he promoted the creation of an autonomous section for political science within the old Associazione Italiana di Scienze Politiche e Sociali. This section was soon to become independent and, in 1981, the Società Italiana di Scienza Politica (SISP) was founded. By 1976, when Sartori left Italy for prestigious academic positions at Stanford and later Columbia, the foundations of Italian political science had been solidly established.

While primarily an academic of international standing, Sartori was never just a dispassionate observer of political life. He reserved special attention for Italian politics and, particularly from the 1990s, when the Italian political system underwent a rapid tectonic change after decades of continuity, he took part actively in Italian political and constitutional debate. In frequent editorials in some of the most important Italian newspapers, he advanced his proposals for constitutional engineering and electoral reform while at the same time vigorously castigating the ideas, choices and strategies of politicians. His wit gave him a popularity beyond university walls but also left him with a good number of enemies. The clarity and sharpness of his proposals made them difficult to digest by Italian politicians.

He will be remembered as one of the leading political scientists of the twentieth century.