This paper has a twofold aim: to disentangle the question of party decline, analysing the current meanings and the empirical evidence offered by the literature; to highlight the different and even opposite outcomes of such decline. As far as the party crisis is concerned, contrary to a shared knowledge it is difficult to give a final word. It is suggested that the crisis concerns more a type of party rather than the party per se. Second, the challenges to the party are analysed. In the last decade a convergent attack against the traditional parties has been carried on: on one side, by the new social movements and their partisan representatives, the left-libertarian or New Politics parties; on the other side, by the newly emerged extreme right parties. This paper tries to demonstrate that both types of party are the by-products of the same structural conditions and both provide a (different) answer to the crisis of the party's expressive function.
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