Marco Giuliani

Governing Without Surviving?: An Italian Paradox: Law-Making in Italy, 1987-2001

Almost 25 years ago, Di Palma portrayed the Italian political system as one in which parties, executives and political élites survived without governing. Much of his interpretation was based upon a careful empirical investigation of the actual functioning of the legislative process. We adopt the same perspective in order to evaluate if, after the major events and institutional transformations which have shattered the Italian political landscape, Di Palmas original hypothesis still holds at the turn of the century. In spite of the lack of control of the ordinary legislative process exhibited by executives in the last four legislatures (1987-2001), together with a marked systemic instability, the last few years have witnessed the successful introduction of significant reforms in several sectors. Paradoxically, during the 1990s, the major political actors have shown themselves to be more capable of governing than of surviving.

The Italian parliament: In search of a new role?

The consolidation of Italian democracy dates back to the early 1950s. This half-century – a rather long period compared to the other Southern European countries – is now traditionally perceived as being composed of two different time intervals. The first 40 years were marked by continuous crises but even more by an overall political stagnation, and the last decade characterised by deep changes both in the institutional structure and in the partisan composition of the political system. The Italian Parliament has been at the centre-stage of both periods. Through a careful examination of its internal organisation and accomplishment of major functions – electoral, oversight, expressive and legislative – the chapter identifies the actual extent of the transformation experienced in the last legislatures. A clear picture emerges of an institution looking for a new role, caught between a majoritarian thrust and the Europeanisation process. This work is the result of a lengthy collaboration by the two authors on these topics and of a joint research project. Although each section was thoroughly discussed, sections 1, 3, 4 and 5 were written by Marco Giuliani and sections 2, 6 and 7 by Giliberto Capano.

Patterns of Consensual Law-making in the Italian Parliament

The transformation of the Italian political system, which began in the early 1990s, should have had an impact upon internal parliamentary dynamics, and in particular upon the degree of consensualism within the legislative process. In this article we are going to examine this hypothesis in the light of the new empirical evidence we have regarding the analysis of Italys legislative process, and we shall provide a series of explanations for the unexpected degree of persistence of those legislative patterns characteristic of the so-called ‘first republic’.

Europeanization and Italy: A Bottom-up Process?

Abstract This article offers a synthetic review of the domestic effects of the EU integration process on Italian politics and policy. Although Italy has recently undergone a process of rapid transformations, the overall account of these changes is far from clear. It is argued that the Europeanization process passed through the window of opportunity opened by the crisis of the entire party system, but it affected the internal arena by changing the attitudes of domestic policy actors rather than by imposing reforms on the political structures. The dynamism of certain policy arenas may even alter specific institutional relationships, but it cannot be assumed that some peculiar features of the present Italian political system will clash against the EUs potential evolution towards a power-sharing configuration.

Measures of Consensual Law-Making: Italian “Consociativismo”

Abstract This article has three different aims. Firstly, to identify the distinguishing features of Italian consociativismo, contrasting them with the characteristics of Lijpharts consociational democracies. Secondly, to introduce the main hypotheses which have been advanced in the literature to interpret this phenomenon; and thirdly to discuss them in the light of new or updated data and indicators of consensual law-making.

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.

Patterns of democracy reconsidered: The ambiguous relationship between corporatism and consensualism

Arend Lijpharts Patterns of Democracy, similar to most of his work, elicited fierce scientific debate. This article replicates some of the analyses proposed in its second edition (published in 2012) in the light of the critiques received by the first edition (published in 2009). It primarily examines the relationship between institutional setup and interest group representation, disentangling the effect of consensualism from that of corporatism on issues such as macroeconomic performance and governance capabilities. The article further deepens our understanding of the complex causal mechanisms connecting these variables, proposing a more sophisticated empirical investigation that emphasises selection effects and conjunctural causation.

Brand New, Somewhat New or Rather Old? The Italian Legislative Process in an Age of Alternation

This special issue of South European Society & Politics explores the transformation of Italys law-making process, and presents fresh data and a series of original analyses, with regard to four key topics: the role played by the bicameral structure of parliament; the effects and dynamics of the amendment process; the overall level of consensualism in the adoption of most bills; and finally, the more adversarial, complex nature of the budgetary process. Here, we offer a brief introduction to the Italian legislative process during the 1996–2006 decade, as a framework for subsequent in-depth analyses, followed by the reasons for our choice of topics for discussion.

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.

Making sense of pollsters’ errors. An analysis of the 2014 second-order European election predictions

ABSTRACT Pollsters have been recently accused of delivering poor electoral predictions. We argue that one of the reasons for their failures lies in the difficulty of including an updated deep understanding of electoral behaviour. Even if pollsters’ predictions are not forecasts produced by models, the set of choices needed to produce their estimates is not indifferent to a theoretical comprehension of electoral dynamics. We exemplify this lack of theory by using an original dataset consisting of 1057 party*poll observations in the case of the last European election. Pollsters failed to account for what we know about second-order elections, thus overestimating government and big parties, which normally obtain poor results in European elections, and underestimating new and Eurosceptic ones, which usually perform well.