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 >>>

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 >>>

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 >>>

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 >>>