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Patterns of Consensual Law-making in the Italian Parliament

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13608740802005777

1743-9612

Marco Giuliani,

European Union Policy and Governance

Abstract 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 Italy's 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’. Keywords: ItalyParliamentLegislative processAlternationConsensualism Notes [1] The 13th legislature (1996–2001) covered four different governments characterized by slightly diverse coalitions. The crisis of the Prodi government led to major changes in the centre-left coalition, with the inclusion of the new ‘Italian communists (PdCI)’ group and the centre ‘Democratic Union for the Republic (UDR)’; however, it nevertheless managed to survive to the end of the legislature. The 14th legislature (2001–6) only featured two governments, both led by Berlusconi and with the same parties within the governing coalition; however, the prime minister had to replace prominent members of his cabinet on more than one occasion, due to scandals and internal political divergences. The 15th legislature (2006–8), on the other hand, has not been as successful. The scant majority enjoyed by the government in the senate was eventually insufficient to counterbalance its internal centrifugal tendencies, and Prodi unsurprisingly failed to pass a confidence vote in January 2008. [2] Different countries assign different roles to parliament in the legislative process (Kurian 1998 Kurian, G. T., ed. 1998. World Encyclopedia of Parliaments and Legislatures, Washington: CQ Press. [Google Scholar]; Norton 1998 Norton, P., ed. 1998. Parliaments and Governments in Western Europe, London: Frank Cass. [Google Scholar]; Loewenberg, Squire & Kiewiet 2002 Loewenberg, G., Squire, P. and Kiewiet, D., eds. 2002. Legislatures. Comparative Perspectives on Representative Assemblies, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. [Google Scholar]). The quantity and type of policies actually approved by law vary from one political system to another, thus strongly biasing or limiting any quantitative cross-country comparison, and complicating the task of verifying hypotheses even in the case of qualitative analyses (Giuliani 2005 Giuliani, M. 2005. Il senso del limite. Problemi aperti nell'analisi del legislativo. Rivista Italiana di Politiche Pubbliche, : 15–55. [Google Scholar]). [3] As far as we know, only Spain has a similar procedure; this procedure has been selectively used, especially during González's socialist governments. Although the percentage of bills passed by committees is similar, even at its peak the absolute number was roughly half the Italian figure at its historical minimum. See Sánchez De Dios (2006 Sánchez de Dios, M. 2006. Output of the Spanish Cortes (1979–2000): A case of adaptation to party government. European Journal of Political Research, 45(4): 551–579. [Google Scholar]) for an account of the Spanish case. [4] In theory, the measure of consensualism should include the possibility of bills being defeated in the final vote by narrow majorities. In reality, bills that reach that stage are very rarely rejected — there have only been 20 cases in the past decade, and they were not all characterized by an adversarial vote — and this factor does not affect our figures or our conclusions. [5] Studies have suggested different ways of considering these indexes, depending on the degree of consensus when the divisions take place, the size of the parties and the level of turnout (Casstevens 1970 Casstevens, T. W. 1970. Linear algebra and legislative voting behaviour: Rice's indices. The Journal of Politics, 32(4): 769–783. [Google Scholar]; Morgenstern 2004 Morgenstern, S. 2004. Patterns of Legislative Politics. Roll-call Voting in Latin America and the United States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]; Desposato 2005 Desposato, S. W. 2005. Correcting for small group inflation of roll-call cohesion scores. British Journal of Political Science, 35(4): 731–744. [Google Scholar]; Hix, Noury & Roland 2007 Hix, S., Noury, A. G. and Roland, G. 2007. Democratic Politics in the European Parliament, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Unfortunately, most analyses tend to focus on sub-parliamentary units such as parties or committees, and cannot, as a rule, be applied to parliament as a whole. Generally speaking, these kinds of index are not flawless (for a summary of their limitations, see Krehbiel 2000 Krehbiel, K. 2000. Party discipline and measures of partisanship. American Journal of Political Science, 44(2): 212–227. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), although most of the problems that arise are due to their interpretation at the party level, as a measure of internal discipline. [6] Therefore, the values are not calculated in order to assess party discipline, but to evaluate the behavioural homogeneity of roll-calling throughout the chamber, regardless of party affiliation. The figure for 2001 represents the average figure for roll-call voting on 70 laws during the 13th legislature, and on 48 laws during the 14th legislature. [7] As a benchmark, it is useful to bear in mind that the Rice index for the vote of confidence given to the five governments during the two legislatures in question, ranges from 0.034 (Amato II) to 0.164 (Berlusconi III). The index of agreement ranges from 0.278 (Prodi I) to 0.370 (Berlusconi III). [8] Politicians of completely different persuasions, such as Fausto Bertinotti (speaker of the lower chamber in the 15th legislature), Pier Ferdinando Casini and Silvio Berlusconi, explicitly referred to the ‘death of bipolarism’ and to the failure of the majoritarian experience of the second republic, resulting from the unavoidable legacy of Italy's proportional political past. [9] Technically, we fitted a general linear model with a logit link and the binomial family because our dependent variable is strictly confined between 0 and 1, and we estimated robust standard errors in case we were to mis-specify the distribution family (Papke & Wooldridge 1996 Papke, L. E. and Wooldridge, M. 1996. Econometric methods for fractional response variables with an application to 401 (k) plan participation rates. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 11(6): 619–632. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). [10] Without that dummy, the coefficient is actually positive and statistically significant. This may even be the effect of some statistical artefact: the greater is parliamentary support for government, the higher the agreement index in the case of a well-disciplined coalition. It is worth noting that the same model, run exclusively for the 13th legislature, gave a significant negative coefficient: in fact, the minority Prodi government had to assemble its legislative majority on the floor, whereas the other centre-left minimum winning governments may have relied more on their parliamentary base. However, the ample majority enjoyed by Berlusconi in the 14th legislature has probably eliminated this effect from our full model. [11] Even the interpretation of the so-called index of likeness between parties (Rice 1928 Rice, S. 1928. Quantitative Methods in Politics, New York: Knopf. [Google Scholar]) — a set of measures of similarity in the legislative behaviour of political parties – may be of greater interest if compared with the proximity of their preferences. For an analysis of this index for the 13th and 14th Italian legislatures, see Pelizzo (2007 Pelizzo, R. (2007) ‘Partito di cartello e caso italiano, mimeo; a 2006 English version can be found as SMU working paper in humanities and social sciences, no. 10, available at: https://mercury.smu.edu.sg/rsrchpubupload/7022/cartel_party_in_italy.pdf [Google Scholar]). [12] It should be pointed out that the second Prodi government came to office in May 2006 with the support of 56 per cent of the MPs: this is roughly the same percentage that its budgetary bills received during its first 18 months in office.