Government alternation and legislative agenda setting.Lessons from Italian Politics.

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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]