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Italian politics has gone through a political and institutional upset for the last fourteen years and also the legislative arena has been affected by important changes. The governments seem to play a stronger role in legislative agenda-setting than in previous decades. Despite this intriguing dynamics, no one has tried to connect systematically the above-mentioned changes with the changes in the broader political environment.This paper tries to fill the existing gap. The main hypothesis, inferred from a very simple model, is that in a parliamentary democracy an increase in the government alternation size affects positively the legislative agenda setting power of the government through the relative position of the status quo. I test the model predictions both by analyzing a specific Italian normative instrument (the so called "delegation") and by a cross national correlation between a measure of the government alternation and a measure of the government legislative agenda setting power. The empirical evidence encourages further deepening. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last legislatures, the Italian governments seem to have played a stronger role in the law making than in the past decades. This phenomenon does not seem to be connected with a change in the institutional means of the Executive agenda control; no new relevant rule has given directly more power to the Executive in the legislative bargaining. It is an (apparent?) increase of the Executive’s independence in determining the definitive content of the legislation. And the Parliament gives this independence by the delegations in the delegating laws, a kind of legislative instrument that has been included in the Italian Constitution for more than 50 years. In this paper I propose an explanation centered on the legislative game structure and the distance between the Executive and the Parliament in a multidimensional policy space: despite the appearances, the delegations in the delegating laws would be the counterintuitive outcomes of a wider distance between the two branches of the Italian Government. They are used for solving a problem of ‘credible commitment’ plaguing the Principal-Parliament in its relationship with the Agent-Executive. An important corollary can be inferred from the main argument: an increase of ‘delegations’ does not mean necessarily an increase of the delegation size in favor of the Italian Executive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]