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Ministers can have an incentive to adopt policies through secondary legislation that deviates from the general compromise reached via the primary legislation. We suggest that when secondary legislation is at stake, in some countries coalition partners can rely upon the ex-ante legal scrutiny of courts as an extra-cabinet control mechanism. We focus on the interaction between governments and the Council of State, the highest administrative court and the most important consultative body of the government in Italy. Our findings support the general hypothesis that the Council's activism as an advisor is generated by the demand for control mechanisms on the secondary legislation. Such a demand is affected by specific political conditions, i.e. the level of government heterogeneity and government alternation. The findings on the Italian case can be a starting point for research on the different levels of involvement of administrative courts in the executive politics that characterize European Democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on committees in multiparty legislatures in parliamentary democracies focuses on their role in solving intra-cabinet delegation problems. Using a straightforward spatial model, this article discusses how committees can also solve uncertainty problems that arise in settings characterised by unstable coalitions, weak governmental agenda control and a lack of government change. In order to explore empirically how committees solve these problems, the article focuses on the success (and later decline) over the last 30 years of the sede legislativa, a law-making procedure that formalises ‘universalism’ in Italian legislative committees. The statistical results largely confirm the theoretical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]