4,993 research outputs found
The legislative agenda setting power in a changing parliamentary democracy : the Italian puzzle
No full textAccording most of the Italian and International scholars, during the so-called First Republic the short living Italian cabinets have not been enjoyed strong procedural prerogatives in the legislative process (Predieri 1964, 1975 Döring 1995). Yet, Italian politics has gone through a political and institutional upset for the last thirteen years, and also the legislative arena has been affected by changes. In this period, the Italian governments seem to have acquired a stronger role in the legislative agenda setting; parliamentary committees have lost their traditional centrality, the usual consensual style of the decision making has been often changed in a harsher one; and the legislative output has been decreased (Capano & Giuliani 2001, 2003, Zucchini 2001, Vassallo 2001, Fabbrini, 2000, De Micheli & Verzichelli 2003, Ieraci, G. 2003).
Despite this intriguing dynamics, none have tried to evaluate systematically the changes in the agenda setting power distribution, neither to connect them with other changes in the broader political environment. This paper tries to fill the existent gap.
The primary intent is to summarize the information about all current methods the government uses to control parliamentary agendas (Doering 1995, Tsebelis 2002), looking for the main changes that have taken place in the last decade. On this subject the evidence seems mixed: there are not relevant changes in the Parliamentary standing orders about the Government’s role, and no change has been carried out about the Executive’s Constitutional prerogatives. Yet, important changes have permanently taken place without the approval of new formal rules, through a the revitalisation of old constitutional prerogatives (the delegated decree authority) (Zucchini 2003), through the effects of a third player intervention (the Constitutional court), through apparently marginal innovations in the legislative process.
The secondary goal of this paper is putting forward a plausible and testable hypothesis about the source of this legislative agenda setting evolution (and its features). I argue that, at the moment, the law making is affected by two contrasting factors. On one side, the party system has turned from the pivotal to the “alternational” type (Strom 2003, Verzichelli, L. e M.Cotta 2000); therefore, Government has achieved more legislative agenda setting power vis à vis the Parliament, mainly as reaction to the increased responsiveness of Government formation and Government behaviour to electoral results. The overall effect is more delegation of legislative power from the principal-parliament to the agent–executive and from the party backbenchers to the party leadership. On the other side, the persistent high number of veto players (and the large size of the Veto players’s Pareto set) restrains the Government to play a more incisive role (Tsebelis 2002), it helps to maintain the status quo in many policy areas, it moves further the struggle for the legislative agenda setting from the Executive-legislative relationship towards the intra-Cabinet interaction. The present parliamentary debate about the reform of Italian constitution would reflect at least partially this situation
Replication Data for: Legislative Committees as Uncertainty Reduction Devices in Multiparty Parliamentary Democracies
No full textData allow to replicate article's regression analysi
Replication Data for: Legislative Committees as Uncertainty Reduction Devices in Multiparty Parliamentary Democracies
No full textData allow to replicate article's regression analysi
Replication Data for: Gender and party cohesion in the Italian parliament: a spatial analysis
No full textStudies on female legislative behaviour suggest that women parliamentarians may challenge party cohesion by allying across party lines. In this paper we analyze a specific parliamentary activity - bill cosponsorship - in the Italian lower Chamber, between 1979 and 2016, as a source of information about MPs’ original preferences to study how gender affects party cohesion. Do women form a separated group in the Italian parliament? On average, are they more or less distant from the center of their parties than men? Does gender affect systematically party cohesion? A principal component analysis of co-sponsorship data allows us to identify the ideal points of all MPs in a multidimensional space for each legislature. Based on these data we estimate the impact of gender on party cohesion at the individual level while controlling for the impact of several other variables of different kind (individual, partisan and institutional). We find that: 1) on average, women show lower cohesion as a group inside different parties and higher party cohesion than men; 2) the influence of gender on party cohesion is not conditional upon individual characteristics, upon the size and organization of parliamentary parties and upon the share of women in their parliamentary groups; 3) the different behaviour of women MPs may depend on the different patterns of recruitment in the parties
Replication Data for: Gender and party cohesion in the Italian parliament: a spatial analysis
No full textStudies on female legislative behaviour suggest that women parliamentarians may challenge party cohesion by allying across party lines. In this paper we analyze a specific parliamentary activity - bill cosponsorship - in the Italian lower Chamber, between 1979 and 2016, as a source of information about MPs’ original preferences to study how gender affects party cohesion. Do women form a separated group in the Italian parliament? On average, are they more or less distant from the center of their parties than men? Does gender affect systematically party cohesion? A principal component analysis of co-sponsorship data allows us to identify the ideal points of all MPs in a multidimensional space for each legislature. Based on these data we estimate the impact of gender on party cohesion at the individual level while controlling for the impact of several other variables of different kind (individual, partisan and institutional). We find that: 1) on average, women show lower cohesion as a group inside different parties and higher party cohesion than men; 2) the influence of gender on party cohesion is not conditional upon individual characteristics, upon the size and organization of parliamentary parties and upon the share of women in their parliamentary groups; 3) the different behaviour of women MPs may depend on the different patterns of recruitment in the parties
Supplemental material for Government coalitions and Eurosceptic voting in the 2014 European Parliament elections
No full textSupplemental Material for Government coalitions and Eurosceptic voting in the 2014 European Parliament elections by Stefano Camatarri Centre de Science Politique et de Politique Comparée (CESPOL), Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium Francesco Zucchini Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Milan, Italy in European Union Politics</p
Horses and hippos : Why Italian government bills change in the legislative arena, 1987-2006
No full textScholars 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-à-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.parliament
and why.
In this paper, we investigate the changes made to governmental legislation in Italy. Taking the
modifications occurring during the legislative process as the dependent variable, we discuss
and test a number of explanatory hypotheses derived from both existing scholarship and
original arguments. By doing so, we also try to indirectly find out some aspects of the often
unobservable decision-making process within the cabinet.
Our findings are also relevant for comparative research. During the period that we have
investigated (1987–2006), Italy has been characterized by two distinct electoral systems, two
extremely different party systems, governments with various ideological orientation and
range, both partisan and technical ministers
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