Suchergebnisse

The drafting of a coalition agreement does represent a crucial arena for partners in parliamentary governments: it allows them to reach, even before the executive is in place, the necessary compromise (and eventually "package deals") over a set of policies to implement, and on the content of the main laws to promote. The coalition agreement could also be more than a programmatic platform: defining, for instance, special rules to solve future intra-coalitional conflicts. A coalition agreement, thus, could play an extremely important role in limiting the transaction costs intrinsically related to the formation and implementation of important government (legislative) decisions. Being of exploratory nature, this paper wants to analyze the role of coalition agreements recently implemented by the Italian governments. In the first part, the literature about coalition agreements as a decision-making arena is presented. In the second part, the characteristics of the coalition agreements drafted by the Prodi I government (in 1996) and by the Berlusconi II government (in 2001) are then analyzed. In a final part, we present some empirical evidences on to what extent the coalition agreements drafted by these two governments have functioned as point of reference for the process of government decision making: to what extent the bills the Council of Ministers has approved and presented to the parliament are linked to the goals of the coalition agreement? And conversely: to what extent the pledges included in coalition agreements have been transferred into governmental decisions. And again, incidentally: does the drafting of a coalition agreement facilitate the adoption of significant legislation by the executive? And is this legislation also relatively more conflictual in parliament?

Opposition responsibility is a neglected field, and if at all noticed, opposition parties are often placed in the irresponsibility frame. The purpose of our paper is to examine to what extent, under which conditions, and in which ways opposition parties can be considered to act responsibly. This article will develop the concept of opposition responsibility and test the expectations in the behaviour of opposition parties in three countries: Hungary, Italy and Spain. The analysis highlights that opposition responsibility exceeds—although does not exclude—policy making and scrutiny activities as it has broader implications. We shall regard the opposition's general performance and their political system-related behaviour as components of responsibility.

The article explores recent changes in the Italian parliamentary elite thanks to a novel set of data on Italian MPs between 1946 and 2018. After a first discussion on some crucial long-term trends of Italian Lower House MPs (their turnover rate, seniority, gender balance, party-related or institutional experience), we focus on the possible explanations of the profound transformation that occurred in the past decade: the rise of new party actors, the realignment between citizens and the parliamentary elites, or the use of different electoral systems. Subsequently, we point at three MP categories, taken as the most relevant proxies of the innovations in the Italian parliamentary elite. These categories are based on the length of MPs' parliamentary career, their previous party or institutional experience, and their gender. We discuss the changing numerical relevance of these categories, their parliamentary career patterns, and some features related to the institutionalization of MPs belonging to such categories. Two implications clearly emerge from our analysis. First, the changes occurred in the so-called "decade of the crises" (after the 2013 and 2018 Italian general elections) are critical in terms of a new influx of political amateur, female, and young MPs. The magnitude of this renewal can hardly be compared to any other relevant turning point of the Italian republican age and might signal the existence of a pattern of "impossible stability" for the parliamentary elite. Second, and partly in contrast with the first implication, despite such changes, the perspectives of parliamentary career and parliamentary survival remain very much subordinated to belonging to strong parliamentary party groups. This signals that, despite broad discussions about the positive role exerted by new political actors and the demand for a stronger descriptive representation, what seems to matter in the Italian Lower House is the presence of powerful political parties.