Francesco Zucchini

Government Alternation and Legislative Party Unity: The Case of Italy, 1988–2008

The large literature on legislative party unity identifies the confidence relationship, i.e. the threat of being voted out of office and losing agenda setting powers, as well as cabinet membership, as two crucial institutional sources of party discipline. However, by focusing on the dramatic change in the Italian political system following the 1994 election, the article shows that the impact of these factors on party unity (and the direction of this impact) hinge crucially on the possibility of government alternation rather than mere cabinet turnover. This is illustrated by an index of party unity that explicitly focuses on the behaviour of individual MPs derived from a roll-call analysis of the Italian Chamber of Deputies during the period 1988–2008.

Horses and hippos: Why Italian government bills change in the legislative arena, 1987-2006

Scholars interested in legislative processes pay relatively little attention to the changes made to bills in parliamentary democracies. On the one hand, comparative research has often described parliamentary institutions as ineffectual vis-a-vis cabinets throughout the lawmaking process; on the other hand, for a long time the rational choice literature has focused more on the formal rules regulating amendatory activity than on amendatory activity itself. Hence, very few studies have tried to explain how much government bills are altered in parliament and why. This article investigates the changes made to governmental legislation in Italy. Taking the modifications occurring during the legislative process as the dependent variable, a number of explanatory hypotheses derived from both existing scholarship and original arguments are discussed and tested. This also allows the identification of some usually unobserved aspects of the decision-making process within the cabinet. The findings can also be relevant for comparative research since Italy has been characterised during the period under scrutiny (1987–2006) by two distinct electoral systems, two extremely different party systems (pivotal and alternational), governments with various ideological orientations and range, and both partisan and technical ministers.

Testing the Law-Making Theories in a Parliamentary Democracy - A Roll Call Analysis of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (1988-2008)

The theoretical efforts in the rational choice approach to explain the law-making process in United States Congress have been increasingly matched by attempts to test the relative explanatory powers of different theories (Cox and McCubbins 2005; Krehbiel et al. 2005). No such effort has so far been made by scholars of parliamentary democracy, and this chapter tries to fill this gap. We present a typology of law-making models in parliamentary democracies based on the distribution of agenda-setting and veto power in the legislative arena. This allows us to contrast a particular adaptation of the procedural cartel model with two different versions of the veto player theory (Tsebelis 2002).Using the roll calls of 10th to 15th Italian legislatures, we evaluate, via cut points distribution, the explanatory power of these law-making models under a large variety of political circumstances (different party systems, different legislative sponsorship as well as all possible types of government format).

The institutional foundations of committee cohesion in a (changing) parliamentary democracy

The role played by legislative committees in parliamentary democracies is directly related to some of their properties. In particular cohesion, namely similarity of committee members’ preferences, is the most important non-institutional feature that influences committee working. This non-institutional aspect, on its turn, is directly affected by the institutional environment. In this paper we hypothesize that electoral rules, committee agenda setting power and MP’s level of knowledge of the committee policy domain influence the committee cohesiveness by affecting the utility that a MP derives from a purposeful choice of the legislative committee she belongs to. To test this proposition we focus on the last 30 years of Italian legislative activity using data from co-sponsorship to infer MPs’ preferences in a multidimensional policy space. During this period Italy has experienced drastic changes in its political system. These changeable circumstances give a strong comparative flavor to the present study. Statistical analysis at individual level confirms our hypotheses.

Legislative Committees as Uncertainty Reduction Devices in Multiparty Parliamentary Democracies

Most research on committees in multiparty legislatures in parliamentary democracies focuses on their role in solving intra-cabinet delegation problems. Using a straightforward spatial model, this article discusses how committees can also solve uncertainty problems that arise in settings characterised by unstable coalitions, weak governmental agenda control and a lack of government change. In order to explore empirically how committees solve these problems, the article focuses on the success (and later decline) over the last 30 years of the sede legislativa, a law-making procedure that formalises ‘universalism’ in Italian legislative committees. The statistical results largely confirm the theoretical expectations.

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.