Fit or Misfit?: Italian Parties in Europe

We depart from the argument that policy congruence between the national and the EU parties has a role in bridging the democratic deficit of the EU. We assess it for the difficult case of Italy, where the issue of parties' transnational affiliation is incredibly divisive, and the party system is in a state of flux. Using the EU Profiler data, we are able to show that its parties are remarkably congruent. Yet, we suggest that congruence might overestimate the parties' representative capacity.