Search

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]

Recent studies of the legislative process have put forward a number of plausible hypotheses regarding the distribution of agenda-setting power. These hypotheses have guided scholars in identifying those conflicts and actors that are crucial to explaining legislative change and the wording of legislation. However, this has not yet led to a better understanding of the choice of specific agenda-setting rules. Why does the cabinet in some parliamentary democracies enjoy an undisputed role, while in others the parliament continues to play the role of co-protagonist? This article attempts to answer this question by looking at some well-known features of party systems. It is argued that in pivotal party systems, with limited government alternation, it is much more difficult to strengthen the government vis-à-vis the parliament. One factor prevents the procedural and institutional predominance of the cabinet under these circumstances: the lack of opportunities for, and expectations of, large and controversial policy change. [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]