Enrico Borghetto

The role of subnational authorities in the implementation of EU directives

Studies on the role of regions in the EU policy process concentrate mainly on policy formulation and implementation of regional funds. In this article, we redress this bias by investigating the formal role of subnational authorities in the implementation of EU regulatory policies, specifically in the transposition of directives. Subnational authorities play a secondary, but increasingly important, role in the application of these measures. Their impact is greater on environmental and social policies, as it is also on public contract legislation. More decentralized states display higher levels of subnational involvement but, in these states, regional participation in national policy-making and a high number of regional authorities decrease the likelihood of finding subnational measures of transposition. There is also more subnational involvement in states with territories that have both an elected government as well as special arrangements regulating their relations with the EU. Finally, subnational involvement tends to prolong the process of transposition.

Complying with the Transposition Deadlines of EU Directives: Evidence from Italy

This article assesses the causes of the timing of transposition of 2179 EU directives, using an original dataset of 3183 laws adopted by the Italian authorities. Amendments to Commission directives are transposed sooner. Additionally, EU laws with longer time for adaptation present a lower risk of delay beyond the deadline. More intense supranational monitoring speeds up transposition and lowers the risk of delay. Interestingly, as the volume of EU laws to be incorporated increases, transposition “accelerates” and, since 1984, delay is less likely to occur. As expected, administrative and legal reforms undertaken at the national level have lowered the risk of delay and increased the likelihood of transposition. Finally, those legal instruments that offer the opportunity to potential veto players to voice their concerns and delay transposition do not appear to corroborate entirely our predictions. As expected, legislative and local authority measures increase the risk of delay, while ministerial acts both lower this risk and expedite transposition. But, contrary to our predictions, legislative and cabinet acts accelerate transposition and cabinet measures increase rather than reduce the likelihood of delay.

Legislative processes as sequences: exploring temporal trajectories of Italian law-making by means of sequence analysis

The study of time in legislative processes has so far understood time mainly as duration (of the process as a whole or of its single stages). This work contributes to existing research by presenting a new approach to the study of time which takes as the unit of analysis the whole temporal trajectory followed by a bill from its introduction to the floor to its final adoption. Legislative processes are conceived of as sequences of stages a bill has to go through before its final adoption. The relative time spent in each of these stages varies considerably. This work aims to explore the determinants of variation in the observed trajectories of relative duration. To this end, it applies the tools of discrepancy sequence analysis, a method commonly employed for the study of occupational histories or life courses. The analysis was conducted on a sample of Italian legislative acts adopted in Italy from 1987 to 2008. Points for practitioners The greater availability of longitudinal data and the increased focus of social science theory on temporal change have contributed to heightening the attention given by social science scholars to the tools of sequence analysis. Scholars are increasingly recognizing that this set of methods may effectively complement existing techniques for the study of temporal data, by allowing new questions to be addressed. This article shows an example of how sequence analysis may be extended beyond the study of life or career histories, where it has been mainly confined. What is more, it presents an application of a novel technique, discrepancy analysis, which allows the study of the relationship between the trajectories and covariates of interest in an explanatory framework.

A Long Way to Tipperary: Time in the Italian Legislative Process 1987–2008

The Italian legislature does not enjoy widespread trust. At least one of the reasons has to be the perception of its inefficiency. Comparatively, the Italian law-making process is slow and most policy-makers complain about the difficulties experienced in trying to speed up the process. In spite of the political relevance of the topic, the issue has not attracted much scientific attention. This study tries to cover that void, focusing explicitly on the temporal dimension of law-making and analysing the duration of more than 3,000 laws approved during the period of 1987–2008: 21 years of intense Italian political history. Our exploratory analysis finds that successful proposals spend most of their time in those stages preceding the discussion in parliament, waiting to find room on the agenda. Concentrating on ordinary laws, we realise that the factors that expedite a legislative process are its sponsorship, the procedure adopted, the policy sector, and the timing of introduction, whereas the level of consensus is not associated with the duration of the process.

EU law revisions and legislative drift

European Union research has made great strides in understanding the dynamics of the European Union decision-making process. In contrast to this progress, the dynamics unfolding after the enactment of a European Union secondary legislative act has largely been ignored. Some of these acts remain in force in their original form for several years while others are revised soon after their enactment. What factors account for this variation? We empirically analyze the proposition that in the presence of ‘legislative drift,’ i.e. the intertemporal variation of decision-makers’ preferences, major revisions of European Union legislative acts are more likely to occur. Based on an analysis of the revision histories of 158 major European Union acts in the time period between 1958 and 2003, we find significant support for this hypothesis.

Leading Governments and Unwilling Legislators: The European Union and the Italian Law Making (1987–2006)

If there is some truth in the old saying that “you don’t marry someone you can live with but rather the one that you cannot live without,” one should not be too surprised by the firm resolve of the Italians (both at the elite and mass levels) to tie their country’s destiny to a strong and stable European Union. For most of its early Republican history, Italy’s governing coalitions considered European membership a sort of “insurance against the threat of democratic breakdown” (Cotta 1992, p.210) posed by extremist parties. Italy’s participation in the European community as one of the founding members and the rising interdependence linking the major capitals in Western Europe represented a political buttress upon which the major pro-European political forces (Christian Democratic, Socialist and Liberal) consolidated their electoral support. The symbolic force of Europe did not lose its raison d’etre even after the “normalization” of the Communist party and its gradual acceptance of the principles underpinning European integration.

From agenda setters to agenda takers? The determinants of party issue attention in times of crisis

Question time represents one of the most relevant institutional arenas where parties compete to get their favourite issues on the parliamentary agenda. Parties select which issue to address by weighing up two commitments simultaneously: fulfilling the party mandate received by their voters at election time and responding to the current priorities of voters. This article assesses the extent to which the recent sovereign debt crisis impacted the way parties balance these two imperatives of democratic representation. Through the issue coding of around 10,000 parliamentary oral questions tabled in Italy, Portugal and Spain between 2003 and 2014, the analysis shows that the worsening of economic conditions intensified the impact of citizens’ priorities. However, there is no clear evidence of a decline in the importance of the party mandate for either the majority or opposition parties. These findings offer insights on the topic of party political representation in Southern Europe and whether it was affected by the Eurozone crisis.

Delegated decree authority in a parliamentary system: the exercise of legislative delegation in Italy (1987–2013)

ABSTRACT The substantial increase in the delegation of legislative powers from the parliament to the executive has been singled out as one of the most prominent changes in the Italian political system of the last three decades. It has given traditionally weak executives the opportunity to adopt significant reforms while bypassing the notorious fetters of the ordinary legislative process. While the literature has to date focused on the motivations to delegate, there is still a research gap on what the executive does with the delegated authority. Based on a newly collected data set covering all delegation provisions adopted from 1987 to 2013, this article analyses why, in a remarkable number of cases, the cabinet did not use the delegations. Results show that the existence of an agreement on the policy in question (as captured by the precision of delegating criteria), as well as the complexity and timing of the delegation have a significant impact on the likelihood a delegation is used.

Institutional Environments and Mayors’ Role Perceptions

The role of mayors and their role perception may depend on the changing role of local governments, different national institutional settings, and recruitment patterns. This chapter presents an analysis of the most significant changes among European mayors in terms of their role perceptions over the past decade. In this respect, the chapter examines mayors’ role perceptions in relation to the changing role of local governments. Furthermore, the question is addressed whether role perceptions of mayors are affected by different forms of their election and institutionally defined horizontal power relations at the municipal level throughout Europe, including recruitment patterns of mayors.

Challenging Italian centralism through the vertical shift of competences to the subnational and supranational levels

This article shows that even though the high hopes of Italy’s most radical federalist advocates were largely dashed as the country remains a regionalised state within a less-than-federal European Union (EU), there have in fact been changes in the vertical allocation of competences since the early 1990s. The article maps these transformations in Italian democracy by tracing the formal transfer of national powers to subnational and EU levels. In addition, it portrays the driving forces behind this competence shift and discusses other outcomes of the process besides the changes in the Italian Constitution and EU Treaties. It concludes that central institutions have only adapted partially and incrementally to this formal transfer of powers.