RICERCA ITALIANA     

Legislative process and policy arenas. Games, vetos and networks in the age of the Italian political alternation.

Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract

The current project addresses the issue of the investigation of changes in the law-making and policy-making processes in complex modern societies and multi-level institutional arrangements. To be more precise, it aims to analyse the main causes of the changes undergone by the said processes within the Italian context, ascertaining on the one hand the possibility of applying hypotheses developed within the international literature, while examining on the other hand those specificities deriving from Italy’s political contingencies.

Our research is therefore organised in order to pursue two principal objectives:
1) A more in-depth understanding of the legislative process, in terms of both the internal dynamics of that process and the products deriving from it.
2) An examination of the more complex evolution of policy processes, focusing in particular on those more sensitive sectors which may serve as “gauges” of the changes currently underway.

Both of the processes in question –law-making and policy-making- have faced numerous challenges over the course of the past decade: challenges resulting from the increasing complexity of problems, which have exalted the role to be played by those actors possessing the greatest quantity of information, or the best problem-solving skills (eg. government as opposed to parliament, administrative apparatuses as opposed to elected bodies, organised stakeholders and think tanks as opposed to political parties, and so on); challenges resulting from the multi-level relocation of normative authority (in an upwards direction as the European Union’s powers grow, and in a downwards direction as a result of the federalist reforms introduced in Italy over the past fifteen years); challenges due to the renewed political framework within which the said processes lie (the new characteristics of the party-political system, animated by parties and a political class that have been largely transformed; the new alternation of governments; the changing relationship with a disaffected electorate; the multiplicity of electoral systems adopted).

In order to understand how the aforesaid challenges have affected the policy-making and legislative processes, the research unit shall be working on three separate, albeit strictly interwoven, analytical fronts. The first involves the creation of a model of the legislative process, including the interplay between the actors in question and the institutional rules which are normally taken limited account of in more traditional reconstructions: the Constitutional Court, the Presidency of the Republic, the speakers in the two chambers, the bicameral structure of parliament itself, the evolution of internal rules, and so on. This first area of analysis, which shall mainly be developed using the analytical theory of rational neo-institutionalism, shall test the majority of its own hypotheses through the adoption of a quantitative approach.
The second front shall involve a deeper reconstruction of the changing role played by the cabinet within the parliamentary arena, with specific reference to the production of laws. A special emphasis shall be placed on the analysis of the link between electoral promises and governmental undertakings; on the closer examination of the cabinet’s actions within the legislative arena with regard to a sample of “large-scale policies”; and on the systematic investigation of the contents and procedural features of all those financial laws adopted in the last decade. The analysis of the budgetary process represents an interesting testing ground for all those hypotheses testing the evolution of the role of the cabinet, its interaction with the other actors – parliament, trade unions, business associations etc. – in a legislative process traditionally affected by a complex system of multiple vetoes.
Thirdly, using once again a series of more qualitative methods, we shall be examining the direction taken by policy change in order to understand how, and to what degree, normative change can guide the manner in which solutions to collective problems are offered and implemented in practice. We shall accomplish an in-depth reconstruction of those dynamics that have affected some of the more important, strategic policy sectors, ranging from the social to the environmental, from agriculture to education, from welfare policy to that regarding the liberalisation of the economy. In this case, we shall be paying particular attention to the cognitive and ideational aspects of policy-making and legislative processes, and shall try to reconstruct the public-private networks that trigger those ideas which in turn produce the solutions to new or unresolved problems, and to systematically classify adopted legislation on the basis of the soundest traditional methods adopted by public policy scholars.

The aforesaid approaches will be integrated in a profitable manner complementing one another in terms of their diverse viewpoints and methodologies. <<<

Principal Investigator

Marco Giuliani Università degli Studi di MILANO

Research Objectives

Research:
Firstly, the project aims to provide new knowledge regarding the workings of the legislative process in Italy, so as to enable a suitable comparison with other advanced democracies to be made. Despite the new knowledge (both factual and interpretative) that has emerged from studies conducted in recent years – some of which produced by the present research unit – further empirical studies are needed in order to make the aforesaid comparisons. As has been pointed out in the projects of the various different local units, there are still a number of areas in which knowledge is still lacking or rather fragmentary. Such areas range from the workings of the cabinet within parliament, to the role of think tanks in policy making; from the importance of procedural rules in parliament to the influence exercised by interest groups; from the real importance of the bicameral system, to the weight of institutions such as the Constitutional Court and the Presidency. The first research objective is thus to fill certain of the aforesaid gaps in knowledge, thus enabling research results to be accumulated over the course of time. Secondly, this new knowledge will be used to test those hypotheses that have emerged from international studies, in the specific case of Italy, whereby the said hypotheses may be proven false, or more probably, be perfected and sharpened to a greater degree. In fact, we are convinced that at least as far as the changes in the legislative and policy-making processes are concerned, the Italian case does not represent an exception requiring any ad hoc explanation, but may indeed constitute an interesting extreme case, one that from the comparative point of view may be useful in improving our overall knowledge of the conditions under which certain given phenomena occur. Thirdly, the present study shall provide the opportunity to deal with the question of policy and law change, using diverse analytical models, and on the basis of different research methods, and thus to potentially highlight various different aspects of the said change, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the chosen methods employed. Finally, the project aims to complete an initial examination of the relationship between the two different types of change. Often it is taken too much for granted that policies vary as a result of legislative change, and while this may well arise, the connection between the reforms in the two arenas is probably a much more complex one. One only has to think of the existing incongruence between the extremely high number of laws – and not only those of a micro-sectoral nature – that have been approved in Italy over the past decade, and the widespread belief that policy is substantially immobile. The investigation of this misalignment thus constitutes one of the specific aims of the present project.

Divulgation:
One of the present research chief objectives is that of representing a point of reference for all comparative studies of the phenomena in question that wish to include Italy among those nations to be analysed. Firstly, we intend to organise the main data regarding the law-making and policy-making processes in a systematic manner, so that it may be utilised in a standardised form by other Italian and foreign scholars. Where possible, this will take the form of specific, standard format databases (SPSS and STATA) which may be readily used by such scholars. As far as regards the more qualitative type of information, we shall be creating special sections within the previously-mentioned website. The research team would like to transform this initial undertaking into a permanent activity. Clearly, this work will require the divulgation of research results at conferences and through the publication of studies. Given the future aim of estending our results for the purposes of cross-country (and not only diachronic) comparisons, international forums shall be the preferred medium, although the divulgation of research results in Italy itself shall also be taken in good account. In particular, the Forlì research unit, with the support of researchers from other local units, intends to organise an international conference designed to publicise its research findings. Among other things, efforts will be made to contribute towards the organisation of the international research agenda, through the submission of candidates for the setting up of workshops (ECPR) and panels (IPSA, APSA, SISP). Finally, the entire research group’s objectives include the writing and publication of a collective volume containing the main empirical results of the study, together with the preparation of a second volume which shall use the said empirical results to promote a broader reflection on the changes that have taken place in the two arenas in question.

Training:
The studies carried out shall constitute the opportunity, or furnish material, for training activities of an academic type – in the form of specialist or post-graduate courses – for public functionaries (such as parliamentary functionaries) and practitioners. The project represents a potential opportunity for the aggregation of interests within this specific sector, and for the field training of young researchers called upon to work on the project. A summer school is planned for the semester following termination of the project, with the main focus on the analysis of the law-making process; although organised by the Milan research unit, this school shall see the involvement of members from the entire research team. Furthermore, the Siena unit is due to organise an informational/training seminar on the government’s role in parliament, while the Forlì unit is due to organise a workshop on the results of the research conducted in the various policy areas. In any case, both the databases created, and the specific studies carried out within the framework of the project, will be utilised as teaching material on the three post-graduate courses which the three research units are involved in.

Networking:
The project is the result, among other things, of previous joint projects conducted with various other groups of international scholars, and is designed to represent an opportunity to extend and reinforce this network of academic relations, and as we have already mentioned, to encourage the inclusion of Italy in international comparative research projects. The aforesaid cooperation with other groups has already been organised along some of the lines, and using some of the methods, proposed in the present project, and as such will invariably favour the internationalisation of political scientific research in Italy. Furthermore, we propose to work closely with the standing groups on law- and policy-making that have already been set up by a number of national and international political scientific associations. This cooperation will help “export” or compare our research agenda through the aforementioned “calls for workshops”.

Experimentation:
On the basis also of the previously mentioned international cooperative projects, the present project hopes to experiment new research methods and investigative techniques, well as using more “traditional” qualitative and quantitative analyses; such methods and techniques require some considerable initial investment in terms of time, learning and the training of co-workers. Such methods include: the reconstruction of the (legislative, institutional, media-perceived) policy agenda through a computerised classification of tests initially carried out in the USA; the analysis of individual MPs’ voting behaviour in parliament, using special methods and software; the identification of the space in which legislative and policy discourse takes place, thanks to a new method employed for the first time in relation to governmental investiture speeches; the repetition of surveys designed to reconstruct the structure of the think-tank network, using network analysis techniques. <<<

First Results

The research units and researchers taking part in the national project, aim to study legislative and policy processes on the basis of a series of diverse models and theories. Inevitably, therefore, the group’s research hypotheses shall focus on a series of separate analytical aspects, and expectations regarding one variable or another shall differ to a certain degree. In some observers’ view, the rules within and outside the parliamentary arena, and the distribution of political party preferences, have a substantial bearing on any explanation of the nature of the legislative process and of the characteristics of legislative production. In the view of others, however, it is the ideas circulating in the wider policy arena that play a prominent role, on a par with that of the actors who help divulge such ideas. Institutional change shall be examined: in some cases, the resilience of institutions themselves shall be underlined, despite those formal changes in the rules governing the same institutions; in other cases, the same changes will be expected to produce effects that go beyond the confines of the specific institution in question. There is a shared interest in the study of those factors that favour or hinder policy change and legislative innovation; at times, the focus is placed on the rules governing veto- and agenda-powers, while at others it is placed on the series of informal networks underlying the formal processes which, although more easily observable, are not necessarily more important. All agree that there is a considerable difference between legislation and policy; however, the present project’s aim is to try and throw light on the entity of this divide, and on the nature of the link between law-making and policy-making.
We are convinced that the aforementioned plurality of approaches and beliefs constitutes one of the most obvious strengths of the present research project, as well as an original contribution to Italian political scientific research. So one of the results were expect to achieve is a demonstration of the profitability of the joint contribution of a series of different approaches, models and methods which although at times may yield rival hypotheses, may nevertheless help towards revealing and explaining empirical political phenomena: and for a project mainly focused on the interpretation of an empirical political phenomenon, this initial expectation is strictly connected to expectations concerning the results of the study, which in turn have already been mentioned in the section on research objectives. Thus we aim to complete an important cycle of studies which began with an analysis of the legislative process during the transition from the First to the Second Italian Republic, then continued with the examination of parliament as an institution with a multiplicity of political functions, and which now comes full circle, back to its roots (law-making in the age of alternation of parliamentary coalitions), and in doing so we want to open up a new area, that of the relationship between legislative change and policy reform. Once again, as well as publishing articles in several reviews (particularly those of an international nature), which we believe to be extremely important, we also intend to publish a collected volume on the development of the present research project, and to organise a second volume covering the entire cycle of our empirical research, and which, leaving aside any specific results and involving a number of other scholars, may fulfil those expectations of a more theoretical nature regarding the link between diverse types of change, the significance of political institutions, the relationship between structural restrictions and the freedom of the agent-actor, and so on.

At the end of the two-year project, the most important (and we believe uncontroversial) expected outcome of our study is without doubt our improved empirical understanding of the transformation of Italy’s legislative and policy processes over the past twenty years. This furthering of our understanding will not be the result exclusively of the considerable quantity of information gathered during the course of the project, but also of those procedures designed to standardise the said information and thus make it more accessible and comprehensible to scholars the world over. The wealth of data, and the ease of access to such data, may enable future scholars to repeat our analyses, or to test additional or alternative hypotheses, perhaps resulting from new demands for research. Furthermore, we would go as far as to say that the format of the aforesaid empirical knowledge will constitute a new standard for subsequent collections of data, by facilitating the extension and updating of such data enormously.
A further inevitable outcome of the present study will be a greater understanding of the effects that certain institutional and political changes have on the legislative arena and the policy process: one rarely encounters a parliamentary democracy that has experienced the kind of important political and institutional changes that have affected Italy in the past twenty years. The chance of utilising a kind of involuntary ideal experiment in which such changes take place while other important socio-cultural variables remain fairly stable, is in any case a wonderful cognitive occasion regardless of the importance of the effect of such changes on the legislative and policy processes.
Finally, even though the old, rather worn adage “in order to decide one needs first to know” is regularly proven wrong, our improved knowledge of the facts should have an impact on those decisions made in order to improve the overall quality of Italy’s legislative processes, and of the policy outcomes of its political and institutional processes; or in any case, it should result in policy makers gaining a better understanding of the complexity of the problems they are called on to deal with. Think, for example, of two critical areas - both of which we deal with in some depth in our study - such as the budget-approval process and the process of implementing EC directives: with regard to both, we could consider ourselves duly satisfied if the voices of political scientists, and the interpretation of their analyses, were given the same importance as they have gained over the years in the field of electoral and governmental studies, or the prestige enjoyed by those ideas that emerge in the wake of economists’ analyses of government finances or market regulation. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Both law-making studies and policy-making studies are, as it were, “constitutively” interested in the question of change. The former tend to focus on ties of an institutional, regulatory nature, deriving from political arrangements that either facilitate or hinder legislative innovation. The latter, on the other hand, have for some time focused on the question of policy change, by examining, first and foremost, the extent and dynamics of change.
Therefore taking an interest in the way that change affects those arenas where laws and policies are “put on trial”, in the underlying reasons for, and the time-scale and impact of, such change, implies dealing with a vital complexity inherent in both processes.
The idea that law-making has been subjected to a process of relocation, gradually being shifted away from the parliamentary chambers, is widely acknowledged as fact. Diverse Italian and foreign scholars have reminded us that parliament performs a series of other functions in addition to that of passing laws, and reference is often made to Bagehot when underlining the point that the legislative function of parliament is not one of its most important ones. The reference to the famous English constitutionalist may also be of use here, for two reasons. On the one hand, as a kind of analytic benchmark in relation to the empirical survey of processes that are far removed, both temporally and spatially, from those analysed in Bagehot’s “The English Constitution”. On the other hand, because that same scholar did not fail to note how the importance of legislative duties in parliament changed over the course of time, and it is this very change that interests us here.
Unlike the strategy pursued by the present research group in the past, where the objective was to ascertain what other functions and duties parliament had other than its legislative function, the present project wishes, on the other hand, to examine which other institutions flank, or even replace, parliament in the performance of this function.
The most obvious “candidate” is the government itself, in virtue of a process of rationalisation of parliamentarism strictly associated with the institutional arrangement. However, the diachronic analysis of the Italian case, whereby the changes in the government-parliament relationship have if anything come about under the same constitutional arrangement, calls into play an entirely different series of variables: regulatory amendments (which differ from the Chamber of Deputies to the Senate), and their effect on agenda powers; Europeanization, which magnifies the asymmetry of information and shifts the decisional barycentre towards subjects capable of directly influencing EC bargaining; the alternation of governing coalitions, which potentially changes the relationship between government and its parliamentary majority also with regard to control over legislative production; the presidentialisation of politics, which although taking various different directions, would seem to have affected most, if not all, European parliamentary democracies.
However, the government is clearly not the only subject that may be cited here: the Courts, with their interpretative capacities and their restrictions on the exercise of legislative power; the bureaucracies, particularly with the reduction in party organisations’ autonomous elaborative powers; the European Union, in the various forms its complex or post-conventional sovereignty takes, or the way in which the logic of the “external restraint” unfolds; local government, in the many shapes and forms that its subsidiary functions take. The list is a long one, and yet cannot be considered exhaustive.
The first thing that the present project shall do is thus to examine these diverse “places of law-making”, and on doing so to try and identify the origins, the entity and the directions taken by this ever-changing relocation of legislative production in Italy. The approach taken shall be of a diachronic, comparative nature, with the focus firmly on the dynamics that have emerged in the past decade compared with previous dynamics, already studied by this very research group in relation once again to Italy. Furthermore, in working between the two areas of law-making and policy-making, the team will be drawing up a classification of adopted legislation, the said classification being based on the more traditional categories adopted in the field of policy studies (Lowi, Wilson, etc.); this operation, albeit often called for, has for a long time been put off by scholars of political production in Italy, due to the timescale and costs involved (connected in particular with the need for homogeneity of classification operations). An explicit cross-country comparative analysis shall not be attempted, although pre-existing international connections will enable the team to check the chosen research path against secondary data furnished by studies carried out in other contexts.
While an analysis of the relocation of the law-making process may benefit from separate analyses conducted according to diverse approaches, and in particular according to the three principal variants of neo-institutionalism, and from empirical investigations oriented towards the study of the various institutions or arenas involved, it could be said that the changes in policy-making have already given rise to their own form of research, which may go under the general heading of governance studies.
The focal aspect of such studies concerns the growing inability of (central) political institutions to resolve the problems of society as a whole. This new challenge has been accompanied by a change in perspective regarding the production of public policies. The main actors are no longer just public institutions, but now consist of a series of public-private networks. The ties inherent in such networks are no longer of the hierarchical variety; they are now characterised by horizontal forms of interaction. A strict division of duties and roles has gradually given way to a greater degree of interchangeableness. Input legitimisation of the legal-rational type has (at the very least) been flanked by output legitimisation, while there has been a transition from electoral responsiveness to the accountability of results: and so on and so forth, in a process that has “replaced” the delegation of direct exercise of authority; “soft” instruments guiding processes have taken over from those strictly normative, “hard” devices; knowledge has become a resource almost on a par with authority. Once again, actors who have always been present in the policy-making process – such as political parties and interest groups for example – acquire, within the transformed framework analysed by governance studies, forms of conduct, a logic underlying their actions, aims and responsibilities, that are completely different, and that are worthy of careful examination here.
It is clear that this type of transformation also involves the relationship between law-making and policy-making, in particular within the Italian context, where an often excessive level of legislative production has been accompanied by failure to govern collective problems. The changes in the policy field, and thus those questions associated with policy change, policy learning and policy transfer, thus represent the second polarity to be dealt with by the present project, and at the same time mark the project’s second point of departure.

We would like to add some brief references to the above-mentioned general reconstruction of the state of the art; references to those studies that have been picked out as points of reference for the work of each individual research unit.

In terms of the internal division of labour, the Milan research unit is the one that focuses more on the legislative process as such, and thus it shall be mainly concerned with the reconstruction of those political studies dealing with this process from, as it were, the multi-institutional point of view. This means that it shall be taking account of all those studies dealing with parliament, government, the constitutional courts, the speakers of the house, the committees, the heads of state and so on, be it from the comparative or the single-country point of view, and containing information that may be of use in order to understand the complex decisional games that influence legislative production. Furthermore, in proposing a diachronic comparative analysis based on quantitative data and, at least in part, involving deductively formulated hypotheses, the unit shall be paying particular attention to existing studies of the balances produced by the nature and rules of the game, to studies of the veto-players, but also to those empirical studies that have focused on the reconstruction of the dimensions of the political space of a given country.

The Siena unit’s research may in a certain sense be seen as situated at the cross-roads between law-making and policy-making. On the one hand, its concern with the operations of government, albeit at different levels – electoral promises, governmental pledges and concrete policy strategies – would nevertheless seem to require a clear choice of reference studies, namely those primarily concerned with the government. In truth, this very stratification and identification of governmental action at different levels means that the Siena unit will have to broaden its theoretical horizons, having to check for significant political features such as the government’s relationship with its parliamentary majority and with the electorate, its battle/cooperation with the opposition, and so on. In this case, against a background of studies dealing with the performance of political systems, a more complete reconstruction of the Italian context would clearly be beneficial in terms of the correct organisation of the empirical analysis in question, which envisages both the compilation of datasets and the conducting of in-depth interviews. Hence the need to take account not only of political scientific studies of government action, but also legal studies and, in particular, those financial studies offering a key to the budgetary process.

The segment that perhaps best characterises the work of the Forlì research team, is that of policy studies, and therefore, as we have already mentioned, those works dealing with changes in governance. Dealing with the connection between law-making and policy-making, through a detailed reconstruction of policy change in certain key public sectors, requires a theoretical analysis capable of integrating various different aspects of the analysis of political behaviour. In particular, the point of departure for this research unit’s analysis shall be the complex interweaving, in policy processes, of cognitive variables (the role of ideas, of epistemic communities and of think-tanks), the more traditional dynamics of power, and the renewed role played by private stakeholders (beneficiaries, interest groups, etc.).

Given the mutual need to interpret change, policies and laws, the clear separation of the roles of the diverse research units should benefit from the diverse viewpoints and methods that this collective project offers.

For the essential references, please refer to the bibliography included in the three B models. <<<