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In bicameral parliaments, upper chambers amend the bills that have been passed by lower chambers, and sometimes bills that are passed in one chamber never become law and just 'die' in the other. Why does one chamber fail or refuse to anticipate what the other will do? What can lead the political actors in one chamber to 'waste' their time and resources on a bill that will be never approved as law? How can we explain the variations in the number of such 'useless' approvals? This article helps answer these questions by focusing on 'useless approvals' in the Italian parliament (1979–2018). Italy offers an ideal setting to analyse this phenomenon, with two houses holding the same powers but characterised by varying degrees of political incongruence over time. We found that differences in preference between the two chambers positively affect the chances of useless approvals, above all for private members' bills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we examine the current literature, no study on policy agenda has so far addressed the agenda of a Constitutional Court in a country that has recently experienced crucial changes in its political system. The present contribution on the Italian Constitutional Court seeks to bridge this gap. We aim at assessing the role the Italian Court plays in the policy process in both the First and the Second Republic by answering two research questions: (1) in its decisions does the Court accommodate themes that are neglected in the parliamentary legislative process? (2) Does the Court (and if so, how often) represent interests and values in opposition to the interests and values supporting the current legislative majorities? By employing an original data set that puts together all decisions of constitutional illegitimacy under incidental review between the years 1983 and 2013, we found that in both Republics Court's agenda is significantly more concentrated than Parliament's agenda, and it does not broadly offer an alternative access point to the policy-making for new or neglected issues. However, at the same time, the alternational system of the Second Republic seems to trigger more immediate and 'salient' reactions from the Constitutional Court, which in that period becomes more prone to sanction recent legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on female legislative behavior suggest that women parliamentarians may challenge party cohesion by allying across party lines. In this paper we analyze a specific parliamentary activity – bill co-sponsorship – 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 behavior of women MPs may depend on the different patterns of recruitment in the parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Italian Law-Making Archive (ILMA) is a relational database that combines information on the legislation, legislative initiative, legislative processes, parliamentarians and government members and policy positions of parties present in different legislatures and governments. It covers a period that extends from the beginning of the 10th legislature of the Italian Republic in 1987 to the end of the 15th legislature in 2008. In contrast to commonly available data sources, records are non-redundantly stored in the database, are organized in different tables characterized by unique keys, and are linked to each other by relations, thus permitting scholars to extract, through queries on a specific web interface, only those data necessary for their empirical studies. This article aims at presenting ILMA and its main components. We describe the type of data it contains, the sources from which these data have been drawn and the procedures used to aggregate available information in a unique and comprehensive database. In the second part of the paper, we offer some practical applications for potential use of the database for quantitative studies of the Italian legislative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles included in this issue display a healthy scepticism towards any naïve parallelism between the changes in the party system, the electoral rules or political communication, and the changes that have taken place in the legislative process. The former are linked to the evolution of the legislative process in indirect, complicated ways which merit a more in-depth examination. All articles do share a common view of what the Italian political system is not: Montecitorio is clearly still quite some distance from Westminster. From the legislative perspective, the Italian political system during the second republic still appears to be a moving 'target'. The comparison between rough legislative figures for the 15th legislature and the equivalent information for previous legislatures does not really help understand in which direction that system is heading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italian bicameralism is a constitutional feature that is quite often the object of criticism from both politicians and scholars. It is also a somewhat neglected topic within Italian political science. The main aim of the present article is to evaluate the level of congruence between the two chambers of the Italian parliament, using original data on legislative activity in the last legislature of Italy's first republic (the 10th legislature) and the last two legislatures of the second republic (the 13th and 14th legislatures). Regardless of the measurement we employ, our study clearly shows that the congruence between the two chambers has declined. As a careful empirical analysis suggests, this phenomenon cannot be solely accounted for by the difference in distribution of party seats or by changes to the law-making rules in the two chambers. The article hypothesizes that the diminishing intraparty cohesion could be the main explanatory factor of such dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]