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Italy: from personalized polarization to technocratic co-operation?
Francesco Marangoni and Luca Verzichelli
(CIRCaP – University of Siena)
Paper to be presented to the Panel
Government-opposition dynamics in the European parliamentary democracies
at the time of the financial crisis.
2012 SISP Congress
Roma, 13-14 September, 2012
First draft. Not for quotation
Abstract
This paper will focus on the practices of executive-legislative relationships in Italy during the
difficult period following the emergence of the financial crisis, in 2008. A period which has also
been characterized by relevant transformations in the political landscape.
The resignation of Mr. Berlusconi (on November 12, 2011), opened the way to the appointment of
a new executive led by the former European commissioner Mario Monti and composed by
"technicians". The new executive is supported by a composite parliamentary majority, including
the centre-right People of Freedom, a small catholic centre and the center-left Democratic party.
The paper has a twofold descriptive and interpretative goal. At first, we will try to illustrate the
original pattern o parliamentary opposition looking at the linkages between the opposition and
governing coalitions before during the last decades. As a second empirical target, we aim at
understanding the degree of coordination of the opposition during the whole phase of crisis
(political and technocratic governments). Finally, we want to measure the magnitude of "intra-
party" opposition, and inter-party cohesion, along the period of the Monti. In order to pursue these
goals, we will provide an intensive and systematic analysis of governmental and partisan legislative
strategies which will allow us to extract a first interpretation of the pattern of emergency
government in the case of Italy.
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Italy: from personalized polarization to technocratic co-operation?
Francesco Marangoni and Luca Verzichelli
(CIRCaP – University of Siena)
Rationale of the paper
When the 16th parliamentary term of the Italian republic started (29 April 2008) many indicators
seemed to show the beginning of a new era of competitive democracy and the end of a long and
exasperating political transition in Italy. The electoral winner, Mr. Berlusconi and his party People
of Freedom (Popolo della Libertà - PdL), could rely on the largest political majority since decades
and, above all, on a simplified governing coalition including only two partisan actors (the same PdL
and the Northern League, LN). On the other hand, only three parliamentary groups represented
the opposition to the new right-wing government: the new-born Partito Democratico (PD), which
was the result of the merging between the Left democrats and the progressive catholic party La
Margherita (the daisy), the movement Italia dei Valori (IdV) founded and guided by the former
“clean hands” prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro, and the centrist catholic party UDC led by a former ally
of Berlusconi, Pierferdinando Casini.
Such a simplification of the political scenario was the consequence of a precise strategy followed
by the two largest parties, whose leaderships had argued that time had come to put their
“majoritarian mission” into practice. Indeed, after the implosion of the composite centre-left
coalition supporting the Prodi II government, the new-born dominant party of that political area
(PD) decided to run alone1, although this would have certainly brought to an electoral defeat. At
the same time, Mr. Berlusconi, sure of his growing personal consensus, was able to impose the
formation of a unitary list in the centre-right coalition2, paving the way to the official foundation of
PdL. The success of the centre-right cartel3 and the excellent result of the PD list determined the
reduction of the minor parties on both the wings of the political spectrum, most of them were
excluded from the new parliament. The number of PPGs was therefore reduced to the smallest
rate in the republican history, being only the LN (on the right side) and the IdV (on the left one)
the possible respective partners of PdL and PD (Chiaramonte 2010).
However, the impression of a “majoritarian scenario” to be realized during the 16th legislative term
was rapidly dissolved by the parliamentary practices. The reasons of this progressive return to
1 One exception was anyway accepted by the PD leader, Mr. Veltroni: the party list of Italia dei Valori (IdV) was, in fact, linked to the PD list, after that its leader (the former judge Antonio Di Pietro) accepted the perspective of a common parliamentary group to be formed in the new parliament. This perspective was actually not followed during the 16th parliamentary term. 2 The decision was actually accepted from the former rightist Alleanza Nazionale party but not from the moderate catholic party led by Pierferdinando Casini (UdC). 3 In order to get the majority bonus provided by the electoral system for the lower chamber, the PdL had to form a two-list electoral coalition with the LN, thus confirming its strategic alliance with Mr. Bossi’s movement.
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complexity have to be surely found within the unsolved dilemma of the unstable Italian party
system. Namely, we should recall here three important phenomena occurred during the
legislature: first of all, the internal problems of the main governing party, the PdL, emerged
already during the year 2010, when the second political figure of the party – the former president
of Alleanza Nazionale, Gianfranco Fini – decided to found a new movement (Futuro e Libertà per
l’Italia – FLI) and to move to the opposition side. However, the attempt of Fini to reunite all his
former followers from Alleanza Nazionale, thus forcing Berlusconi to leave the lead of the
government, failed: Mr. Berlusconi could obtain a renovated, although extremely slim,
parliamentary majority in a dramatic vote on a no-confidence motion, on December 16, 2010 at
the lower Chamber.
The second phenomenon has to do with the internal problems of the PD, which during the
legislature lost a small but significant number of parliamentarians. Among them, the former leader
of the daisy, Francesco Rutelli, who joined the centrist alliance with a handful of moderate catholic
representatives. Other moves were characterizing the left border of the party: although excluded
from the parliament, the so called “radical left” was reorganized by a new leader, the governor of
the Regione Puglia, Nicky Vendola, who became the guide of a new movement (Sinistra e Libertà
– SeL) whose candidates were able to challenge and defeat the PD local leaders in many cities,
including the important municipality of Milan, where a SeL candidate – Giuliano Pisapia - won the
primary election and then was elected mayor in the spring of 2011.
Finally, a general feeling of anti-party sentiment re-emerged, helped by repeated phenomena of
political corruption and maladministration4. During the administrative election in the spring of
2012, such a sentiment materialized as a strong support for the movement Cinque stele (five stars
– M5S) founded some years before by the famous TV comedian Beppe Grillo, whose (potential) list
would count (polls from the summer 2012) on about 20% of the expressed votes, being today the
second or the third “party” nationwide.
However, most of the reasons of the political turmoil characterizing the 16th legislature have also
to be connected to the global economic conjuncture and to the dimension of the European politics:
One should remember here that the collapse of the Berlusconi IV cabinet (November 2011) was
finally not due to a no-confidence parliamentary vote but to a political compromise largely inspired
by the European partners and diplomatically managed by the President of the Republic, Mr.
Napolitano. Likewise, the role of the European institutions – the Central Bank and the European
Commission above all – played a crucial role both in supporting the emergence of a large
parliamentary consensus about the economic measurements to be adopted in order to cope the
dramatic conjuncture and expressed an immediate support to the formation of atechnocratic
government led by the former EU commissioner Mario Monti.
4 After the publication (2007) of the book La Casta, a fortunate journalistic reportage on the costs of the huge Italian political class and its excessive use of public resources, the publications dedicated to the problem of maladministration have continuously grown. The most useful scientific analysis of the phenomenon remains Della Porta and Vannucci (2007). See also Vannucci (2009) for some interesting reflections in a diachronic perspective.
3
Moreover, the discussion about the financial crisis in the area of the Euro, starting with the
summer of 2011, was clearly bringing the “European issue” back on the public agenda: while a
large (but extremely fragile) agreement was forming within the main parliamentary parties to carry
a number of rigorous measures on, and then to support the Monti government, the extreme
positions on the left side (extra-parliamentary pro-welfare radical left) and on the far-right side
(neo-liberal conservatives and leaders of the Northern League) were often recalling the anti-EMU
rhetoric, sometimes expressing an ultimate view to “kill the Euro” and go back to a system of
national currencies. Differently from the first decade of the century, when the positions of the two
adverse governing coalitions were significantly polarized on specific policies, with no major
distinctions about the flagship position about being Europeans (Conti 2009), the issue of the
European integration (with all its compound dimensions) was significantly present and divisive.
The classic pattern of polarization between mainstream and “non familiar” European parties was
still present, but with a very confused set of position even within the same parties (in particularly,
within the PdL).
Given such a background, Italy offers an interesting case for the analysis of the question focused
in this panel – the impact of economic and financial crisis on legislative-executive relationships –
since the above listed endogenous and exogenous factors could have influenced not simply the
legislative behavior of the different parliamentary groups but even the life cycle of the
government: the birth of a peculiar care-taker (but with an ambitious policy platform) technical
cabinet, the process of government formation and the inter-institutional interactions are interesting
here, because they represent the phenomena determined by the conjuncture that the different
parliamentary actors had to deal with.
In this paper we aim at illustrating the evolving of parliamentary scenario during such a delicate
phase. Along the lines of the panel objectives, we will try to assess to what extent the economic
and financial issues have become more important in the public agenda and to what extent the
polarized positions emerged at the beginning of the legislature have converged: in doing this we
will focus particularly three empirical dimensions: the role of political parties/alliances in the
process of government formation, their capability to shape the executive policy plans, and their
reaction (or better, the reaction of the parliamentary floor representing the different political
actors) to the governmental legislation.
In the next section we will present our expectations, connected to some theoretical arguments we
mine from the literature, as well as our research design. The central empirical sections of the
paper, at the moment limited to some descriptive data5, will follow, before to come to the
discussion and conclusion.
Theoretical and empirical prospects
5The content of the empirical sections of the paper is built on the descriptive data presented in Marangoni (2012) and Verzichelli and Cotta (2012), and it still misses an adequate comprehensive discussion of the patterns of adversarial/consensual behavior of parties and MPs during the finale part of the 16th legislature.
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According to the literature based on party manifesto data or even expert surveys, opposition
parties show to be more adversarial on economic issues, while on other matters (like for instance
ethic-related issues or international and foreign policies) they tend to converge or at least to
collaborate with the majority. However, we can assume that, when a “care-taker” government
develops a specific emergency plan asking the support of a large parliamentary basis, the
diminution of the strategic polarization due to the fading of the “opposition roles” would imply an
increasing policy convergence – also in relation to economic issues – among those responsible
partisan actors who are available to cooperate with such a government. The experience of Monti
government could be conceived as the perfect situation for such an example of cooperation, since
the two party actors which used to play the opposite roles of main governing party and main
“official” opposition party decide to support, although externally, a new executive.
Indeed, this executive has to be considered a transitional government, temporarily assuming the
responsibilities of parties that find themselves in a state of weakness (Marangoni 2012). Our first
expectation is therefore very simply summarized in the next proposition:
Proposition 1: the clear parliamentary divide persisted on the economic and financial measures
during the first part of 16th legislature (Berlusconi IV government) should have suddenly
disappeared after the advent of a technical government, although the main themes on the
political agenda and most of the proposed solutions could result rather similar to what already
introduced by the previous political executives.
However, we can easily individuate two possible restrictions to the application of such a simplistic
logic of coherence between generic political “support” and legislative cooperation. The first
limitation has to do with the strategic decision of one of the parties supporting the executive to
“take a distance” from the policy making, thus providing the government with a very limited
delegation, especially in those matters where the symbolic and ideological party orientations
seems to keep significantly far from the guide lines indicated by the executive. The second
limitation has to do with the opportunistic and/or ideological positions of each single MP who could
not accept the party decision to provide the technocratic cabinet with a large and unconstrained
delegation. Obviously, such a constraint would look more and more evident in the case one of the
parties supporting the technocratic government is factionalized, ideologically compound and/or in
the middle of a difficult period of transition in its leadership.
The restrictions above presented can therefore lead to two new propositions, partially
contradicting the first one, which can be summarized as follows:
Proposition 2: the policy making delegation to the technocratic government will be probably limited
when the executive guide lines concern a set of options which constitute the ideological “core
business” of a given party. This latter, in other words, has no interest to pass a decision which is
manifestly conflicting with its basic principles, or even to leave the responsibility (and the eventual
merit) of a given measurement particularly claimed by its electorate to a politically “neutral” actor,
sharing the task of the political support with its “natural” opponents.
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Proposition 3: factionalized and weakly institutionalized parties will have difficulties in confirming
their availability to support the policy platform of the technocratic government since their single
MPs will tend to put a number of opportunistic and individual behaviors in action, thus
delegitimizing the party leaders who openly support the action of the executive.
How can we verify the actual consistency of our propositions – that is to say, the logic generically
individuated in proposition 1 and the two constraints characterizing our propositions 2 and 3? Of
course, it is still too early to get a fully-fledged analysis of the performance of the Monti
Government. However, we can analyze some preliminary data concerning the partisan control on
its process of formation, its policy agenda and its legislative outcomes. In particular, we will look to
the phase of government formation, in order to understand the nature of the “delegation”
provided by the main parties, the degree of autonomy offered to the core ministerial figures, as
well as to the indicators traditionally used in order to monitor the governmental parliamentary
activity. Specifically, we will focus here on the legislative initiative, the degree of legislative success
of governmental bills and the law making strategies adopted by the cabinet once that its initiatives
have reached the parliamentary floor. The data presented in this version of the paper constitute a
first descriptive picture, with no ambition to get a comprehensive interpretation of the model of
delegation provided during the technocratic government. Therefore, our final discussion will be
finalized, more than to a wide-ranging interpretation of the trends in majority-opposition
relationships in Italy, to a provisional assessment of the meaning of such an interruption in the
practice of “competitive democracy” started with the political executives of the so called second
republic.
The process of formation of the “Monti Government” and the partisan control over the agenda
Lets’ start with an outlook of the processes of government formation: the watershed between the
“adversarial” phase and the “limited opposition” phase of the 16th legislature has to be placed on
16 November 2011, when the executive led by Mario Monti took office. The formation of the
government had taken only four days – that means a very speed and simple process of formation
in the hands of the formateur, although the allocation of specific portfolios and other keeping tabs
positions was probably very much debated with/between the political actors6.
During the few days of government formation, Monti was often recalling the notion of ‘national
obligation’, which was also recurring in the speech in which he outlined his government’s program
to Parliament. Using such a concept, he explicitly evoked the role of an executive with a limited
scope of government: the delegation requested by Mr. Monti to the parliament was indeed limited
6 The newspapers reported, above all, a discussion about the proposal of the centre-right party to include two central undersecretaries at the prime ministerial office (or even two vice-PM) to be allocated to high personalities with strong technical skills but also a clear political profile (the names circulated were Gianni Letta for the PdL and Giuliano Amato for the PD). The proposal, in the end, was not implemented and no minister was appointed having an evident political background. The Monti government can be therefore conceived as the second “pure” technocratic government of the republican history, after that led by Mr. Dini in 1995 (Verzichelli and Cotta 2012).
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to the actions to be taken in order to deal with the economic and financial emergency. Such a task
could be better pursued by a pure technocratic government, staffed by people from outside the
world of politics. In this sense the executive headed by Monti can be defined as an ‘interim
government’ (Verzichelli and Cotta 2012), to which political parties delegate some of their power.
Indeed, if we look to the composition of the new government, we see that all its components can
be defined as outsiders (De Winter, 1991; Fabbrini, 2000): that is, they have never been members
of Parliament, and neither were they spokespersons for any of the political parties when they were
appointed as ministers. The same is true, with two minor exceptions1, of the team of junior
ministers and ministers’ deputies.The executive led by Monti, then, closely approximates the model
of a pure technocratic government. Like the Dini government, in fact, it is composed of an almost
perfect panorama of decision makers who were not members of Parliament at the time of their
nomination and, in almost all the cases had not had any previous parliamentary experience (Figure
1). This evidence, although vague, is important to underline the completely different pool of
aspirants characterising this kind of executives in comparison to other form of fully delegated or
interim government, including the other recent governments whose ranks were significantly
populated by “experts” and technicians.
FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE
Looking more closely at the backgrounds of the ministerial team (Verzichelli and Cotta 2012) one
is struck by the predominance of senior public or semi-public administrators and experts (in some
cases university professors) who took on ministerial responsibilities reflecting their specific areas of
competence7. The overall number of ministers is 188, to whom we should add 25 junior ministers
and 3 vice-ministers appointed at the start of the Government’s mandate. As Figure 2 shows, this
is certainly a limited size for in comparison to the recent Italian governments, which confirms the
“care-taker” and somehow limited responsibility of the executive led by Mario Monti.
FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE
Exceptional too is the size (as well as the composition) of the parliamentary coalition supporting
the Monti government. As is well known, in fact, the executive enjoys the support of the two
largest groups in Parliament, the PdL and the PD, besides the support of the central pole including
the catholic centrists of UDV, other moderate from different origins reunited in the Alleanza per
l’Italia (API) and the followers of Gianfranco Fini (FLI). The only cases of opposition to the Monti
government are the Northern League (with a declared adversarial position) and IdV, which had
however voted in favour of the confidence motion giving life to the Government. Consequently,
those voting in favour of the new executive came to 556 in the Chamber (equal to 88 percent of
7 More specifically, Monti’s executive provided places for two private sector or semi-private sector managers (Gnudi, Passera); eight university professors (Balduzzi, Fornero, Giarda, Monti, Profumo, Ornaghi, Riccardi; Severino); eight grand commis (Barca, Catania, Moavero Milanesi, Patroni Griffi, Di Paola, Cancellieri, Terzi, Clini). 8 The ministers with portfolio come to 13, including the Prime Minister, as some have more than one office. More specifically, Monti is also minister for the Economy; Corrado Passera is minister both for Infrastructure and for Economic Development. The ministers without portfolio come to 6 in total.
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the membership) and 281 (over 89 percent of the membership) in the Senate. These were record
numbers as can be seen clearly in Figure 3, which shows the votes in favour of new Italian
governments, as percentages of the total memberships of the Chamber and the Senate, starting
from the tenth legislature.3 The percentages supporting the Monti government were larger by far
than those supporting the preceding governments, whether these were party governments, or the
technocratic or semi-technocratic governments of the period from 1994 to 19969.
FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE
A “limited delegation” in terms of number of policy makers within the cabinet and in terms of
number of policy issues left to the governmental initiative does not necessarily mean a weak
power of agenda setting: if the requested measures to cope the crisis have really to be urgent and
incisive (as in the case of the 2011-2012 economic conjuncture) the cabinet can ask a “special
track” for its initiative and, above all, it can push the parliament to intervene in other policy areas
which are not supposed to be directly touched by the “governmental pledges” but crucial for the
overall action against the crisis. Among these reforms, for instance, institutional arrangements in
order to reduce the cost of politics, the local government and the administrative structures, the
public financing of political parties, and even the electoral system, which during the 16thlegislative
term has been a priority according to all the political actors, with (up to now) no solution because
of the opposed vetoes of the different parties on the various solutions.
Therefore, it is important to look at the way the new executive set a renovated (although not
completely new) agenda of priorities, trying to understand to what extent the room of manoeuvre
was, for the technocratic leadership of Mario Monti, more or less constrained in comparison to the
previous executives, in particular, the Berlusconi IV government.
As already said, since its beginning the government had the specific task of managing and seeking
to withstand the period of acute economic and financial crisis facing the country. Moreover,
differently from the Dini government which was formed less than one year after the beginning of a
legislative term, it was a government that was formed in the knowledge that the maximum term of
its office amounted to no more than a year and a half. The Government’s agenda was therefore
heavily conditioned by its purposes and its time horizon.
During the course of the speech outlining his programme to Parliament at the start of the debate
on the confidence vote inaugurating his government, Monti identified the two primary objectives of
his executive as: 1) dealing with the emergency by assuring the sustainability of public finances,
and 2) implementing a plan for development, modernization and growth. The Chief Executive then
outlined the main strategies he had in mind for achieving these objectives: improvement in the
9In Figure 3 we can see that the Dini government itself obtained the support or abstention of about 90 percent of the deputies (those in favour of the confidence motion had however been just 302, equal to 48 percent of the members of the Chamber, while the number of deputies that abstained had been 270, or about 43 percent) as compared to just over 60 percent of the senators. The Ciampi government, on the other hand, had obtained 491 votes in the Chamber (309 in favour with 182 abstentions) equal to 78 percent of the deputies, and 162 votes in favour in the Senate, equal to just over 51 percent of the membership.
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public finances; implementation of the commitments given to the EU; reduction in the costs of
maintaining elected bodies; rationalisation of the public administration; reform of welfare
legislation; the fight against tax evasion; the taxation of property; the selling off of publicly-owned
real estate; macro-economic policies to encourage growth; intervention in the labour market;
micro-economic policies to encourage growth.
Naturally, it is not our intention here to enter into the merits or the appropriateness of such public
policy objectives. We are, rather, interested in gauging the actual capacity of the executive to set
for Parliament an agenda consisting of its own priorities – a capacity that could not be taken for
granted, given the extreme heterogeneity of the coalition upon which the Government relied, but
absolutely crucial (given the situation of urgency in which the government of technocrats was
called upon to operate).
With this in mind, drawing upon a framework of analysis widely referred to in the literature (Royed
1996; Moury and Timmermans 2008; Moury 2012) we will examine the Prime Minister’s
programmatic statement, breaking the text down into single items (grammatically complete
sentences) and identifying those that emerge as concrete objectives to be reached (for example:
‘proceed to amalgamate the agencies of social security’), distinguishing them from those having a
symbolic nature (for example ‘the fight against crime’) and those useful for developing themes of a
general character (for example: ‘Europe is living through a more difficult period than any it has
gone through since the war’).6Textual analysis of Monti’s programmatic statements thus returns 27
items classifiable as concrete commitments. Table 1 shows how they are distributed (absolutely
and in percentage terms) among the ten policy areas listed above.
TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE
The objective of rationalising the public administration is the most detailed one (having 5
commitments, amounting to over 18 percent of those set out), while the reform of welfare rules
(which was nevertheless among the first and most important acts of the government) is the
subject only of a generic reference, in the Prime Minister’s statement, to the shortcomings and the
inequality (in intergenerational terms) of the Italian pensions system. The reference is not one that
appears like a straightforward programmatic commitment (at least according to our definition)
however much it presaged the course of action the Government was shortly to take in the area of
pensions.
Aside from its substance, comparison of Monti’s programmatic statement with those of the prime
ministers that preceded him shows that at least relatively, the current Prime Minister was better
able to identify a series of objectives to be reached and to focus his inaugural speech in the
Chamber and the Senate upon them. And in all probability this was due not to the existence of a
more wide-ranging agreement among the various components of the governing coalition but
rather to the greater room for manoeuvre Monti at least initially enjoyed with respect to the
parties and their interlocking vetoes in his capacity as a technocratic prime minister called upon to
deal with an emergency. Figure 4 therefore shows the ‘programmatic density’ of the inaugural
speeches of Italian prime ministers in the course of the last four legislatures. This we calculate, for
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the programmatic statements of each government, as the number of specific commitments
identifiable for every 500 words.7
FIGURE 4 ABOUT HERE
The measure of programmatic density is about 3.5 in the case of the Monti government: very
much above the corresponding figures for the preceding governments. The point of comparison
closest in time is the figure for the fourth Berlusconi government which does not rise above 2.37.
Significantly lower is the index of programmatic density for the other governments that took office
during the course of a legislature following the resignation of a previous executive: those led by
D’Alema (October 1998 – April 2000)8 and Amato (April 2000 – June 2001): less than 1.5 in both
cases.
Despite the extremely limited time frame available to the executive, indeed, what the Monti’s
declarations seem to define is a medium-term reformist agenda to which, as Monti himself wanted
to remind in his speech, also future governments will be necessarily committed.
One might wonder to what extent we are in front of a new agenda.The debt crisis, and the
stagnation of the national economy, after all, have plagued Italy since the early 1990s,
representing, at least in theory, the main horizon for the action of any executive in the Second
Republic. However, the situation of severe emergency in which Monti and his executive found
themselves to operate (and the nature of his executive) has certainly meant the government
programmatic pronunciations to define, much more openly and directly than in the recent past, a
plan of “austerity” which would have hardly supported by “political” cabinets.
So, for instance, almost 1000 words (about one-fourth of the whole speech) of the Monti’s
declarations directly concern the reduction of the public debt and the relative actions to reach this
target.The same objectivewas only mentioned by Berlusconi in his 2008 inaugural speech (about
30 words), which, instead, was much more devoted to the themes of growth, institutional reforms
and citizens’ security10, only to see the government priorities necessarily recalibrated after the
explosion of the international financial and economic crisis, and of the Eurozone sovereign debts
emergency.
The programme settled by Monti and his technicians poses high potential costs to be paid by
political actors on the electoral ground, and open the way to the eventual restriction on the policy
delegation previously we argued upon (proposition 2 and 3). The necessity the same prime
minister had toassure the support ofa large and extremely composite majority to the executive,
therefore, offers an additional key to looking atthe content of the agenda presented by the
government to the Parliament.
Rather than a completely new agenda, namely, what Monti presented is a programme which (also)
encompasses the combination of specific measures respectively (and alternatively) coherent with
10 While giving some space to specific objectives that had been leitmotivs of the centre right’s electoral campaignlike: the resolution of the Naples garbage crisis and the abolition of the municipal property tax (imposta comunale sugli immobili, ICI) on citizens’ primary residences.
10
the basic policy platforms of the traditionally opposing (but now jointly sustaining the executive)
center-left and center-right camps, in order to balance the “concessions” each faction is askedto
make (and the “gains” it is supposed to get), and to foster the necessary co-operation.
The reform of the pensions system and of the labour market (favoured, at least in theory, by the
People of Freedom) on one hand, and the introduction of a tax on high patrimonies (supported by,
at least part of, the Democratic party) on the other, is the typical example of the “tickets” between
the basic policy platforms of the two main political actors covered by the Monti’s programme.
Another example of this kindis provided by the incentives to attract private capitals in the financing
of infrastructural projects (following what the previous executive had started to develop), and the
reintroduction of the ICI tax abolished by the Berlusconi IV government, with a strong opposition
by the center-left).
Legislative actions of government and the role of parliamentary parties
A central empirical dimension to be focalized, in our effort to understand the passage from an
adversarial to a collaborative parliamentary environment, is that of the effective impact of the
governmental initiative. Different approaches can be proposed in order to give a comprehensive
picture of such a dimension. In this paper, we just want to discuss some general data concerning
the magnitude of legislative initiative from the Monti government, in comparison to the recent
historical trend.
We therefore shift our attention to the executive’s legislative initiatives during the first nine months
of its term (until 15 August 2012). We start focusing on the quantity and the ‘quality’ of the
measures introduced by the Cabinet in the Chamber and Senate, before analysing the procedures
used by the Government in order to steer its initiatives through Parliament. Finally we will look to
the measure of the success of the initiatives in obtaining parliamentary approval. Table 2 reports
the number of legislative initiatives taken by the executive, by type of act and their overall
relevance on the total number of parliamentary bills.
TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE
Notwithstanding we have to recall once again we are talking about a provisional analysis about a
few month of legislative initiative, the data clearly indicate that in its phase of “take off”
(characterized by a relatively high popular support, if we consider the content of the policies at
stake) the Monti government proved to be a “emergency cabinet” mainly interested to
circumscribe its policy making to the real priorities, through a very selective initiative.
Indeed, as showed in table 2, during the course of the 42 meetings held between 16 November
2011 and 15 August 2012, the Cabinet approved and sent to Parliament a total of 82 bills. A large
share of them (47, 6 percent), however, is accounted for by the 39 bills ratifying international
treaties and agreements. These are often little more than formal acts, perhaps significant in some
cases, but generally without much immediate impact in terms of public policies. Therefore, we
exclude them from the analysis. Namely, we count 43 policy “relevant” bills approved by the
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cabinet in the firstnine months into its term of office. During the same time span, the Berlusconi IV
and the Prodi II executives presented a broader (in this sense less selective) set of initiative to the
parliament: respectively, 57 and 58 bills, ratifications excluded11.
Indeed, apart from the absolute amount of the government bills, our empirical interest needs to
focus on the “quality” of the same volume of initiatives and, in particular, on the tools and
strategies the executive has adopted in advancing its legislative agenda.
The disaggregated data presented in table 2 already showed that the constitutional tool of the
emergency “decree-making” constituted a significant portion of the total activity, accounting for
31,7 percent of the bills sponsored by the Government. With figure 5, we can see how, leaving
again treaty ratifications aside, emergency decrees as a proportion of what we called “substantial
initiatives” rise to 60,5 percent.
FIGURE 5 ABOUT HERE
As expected, an ‘emergency’ government trying to deal quickly with problems regarded by many
(not least the European institutions) as extremely pressing, showed therefore a marked tendency
to seek to pilot its initiatives through Parliament by means of the typical emergency measure of
the decree laws.It is anyway difficult to tell however to what extent this represents an anomaly
with respect to the strategies traditionally adopted by governments. Indeed, it is sufficient to note,
again taking a point of reference close in time that emergency decrees as a percentage of the total
number of initiatives (excluding treaty ratifications) of the fourth Berlusconi government at the end
of the first eight months of its term came to more than 54 percent12. About 23 percent of the
initiatives of the Monti government (excluding treaty ratifications) consist of ordinary law
proposals. Six (accounting for 7,3 percent) are proposed laws of delegation to which must be
added one bill containing clauses delegating the regulation of certain matters to the passage of
government directives. This means, all in all, that the profile of the initiative of the technocratic
government was not so significantly different from the regime of “permanent use of decrees”
characterising the whole period of the second republic, which can be taken as a clear indicator of
ambition but also of political weakness of all the Italian executives (Musella 2012).
The predominance of emergency decrees signed (as explicitly requested by law) by the Chief
Executive indicates that the law-making style pursued by the Monti government has been one
strongly coordinated from the centre of the executive. This is also consistent to the trend of the
two last decades. Given the large number of decrees presented, we can therefore argue that the
various departments of the Prime Minister’s office have, at least formally, contributed to the
drafting of a large proportion of the measures adopted by the Government. If we then take
11 It should not be ignored in this comparison, however, that, differently from the Monti’s government, in charge for the final part of the XVI legislature, the first nine months in office of both the Prodi II and Berlusconi IV executives coincided with the beginning of the respective legislative terms. A completely different point of the government cycle, during which the rate of legislative initiative by the executive could naturally be higher (for different reasons) than with the proceeding of the mandate. 12Emergency decrees passed by the second Prodi government eight months into its term played a smaller role, amounting to just over 32 percent of the total number of government initiatives
12
account of the fact that Monti himself is not only Prime Minister but also has had for about seven
months the responsibility of the crucial minister for the Economy13, it transpires that the current
chief executive been responsible for initiating (alone or together with other ministers) no fewer
than 75 percent of the bills presented by the Cabinet to Parliament (excluding treaty ratifications).
Although in a very provisional manner, we can define this an evidence of presidentialization of the
parliamentary government, since the other technocratic ministers seems to play, with some
significant exceptions14, the role of the expert who finalizes and completes the policy guide lines
already inspired and drawn by the leader (See Marangoni 2012 for detailed data on the authors of
law making initiatives).
What is the reaction showed by the political and parliamentary actors to the selective but intense
program of reforms introduced by the Monti government? This question reflects another
interpretative problem we have posed, about the magnitude and the nature (ideological, partisan
or connected to the opportunistic behaviour of single MPs) of the limitations to the “obvious” policy
autonomy of a cabinet which can theoretically count on about 80% of support from the
parliamentary ranks. In the economy of this paper, our aim is really restricted, since we just want
to check if the governmental pledges have been loyally supported by the parliamentary grand
coalition during the phase of parliamentary adoption of the proposals, and then, to look to some
specific partisan deviations and inter-party conflicts, which can be somehow illuminating about the
effective capability of the government to implement these measures.
As already done in similar studies conducted in the recent past, the indicator we will start with is
the programmatic nature of the Government’s legislative proposals. That is, we classify as
programmatic such legislative initiatives of the executive as those designed to give effect (wholly
or in part) to policy objectives contained in the programmatic statement of the Government (or
rather of the Prime Minister).
Operationally, what we intend to do is comparing, in terms of key words, the titles of government
proposals (besides the actual text in cases where the title is less than clear or is unrevealing) and
the substance of the programmatic statements made by the Prime Minister to Parliament. For each
government initiative, therefore, we are able to reveal the existence, or otherwise, of a connection
with at least one of the commitments and (actual) objectives which analysis of the statements
themselves has allowed us to identify15. From Table 3 we can see that, excluding ratifications,
about 45 percent of the initiatives taken by the Monti government had a programmatic nature.
13Since July, 11, 2012 the vice-minister Vittorio Grilli has been appointed as minister of the Economy and Finance. 14 The most relevant exception was probably that of the Minister of Welfare Elsa Fornero, who conducted personally the difficult dialogue with trade unions and interest associations concerning the reforms of the pension schemes and other welfare-related measures. At least in two occasions, minister Fornero took clear-cut and “personal” positions, forcing the chief executive to stress that the discussion was still open within the government, in order to re-compose the delicate conflict. 15We cannot go further than this. In other words, we can establish the existence of a connection but not how strong it is. In and of itself, the fact that a government proposal concerns a programmatic commitment, tells us nothing about the extent to which the initiative is consistent with the commitment, nor whether, once approved by Parliament, it would actually fulfil the predefined objectives. We are not therefore able
13
TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE
Disaggregated by type of initiative, the data then reveal that decree laws and proposed laws of
delegation have more often been of a programmatic nature than have ordinary bills. Overall, about
70 percent of the initiatives we have classified as programmatic are made up of urgent measures
or measures delegating powers to the Government. The percentage rises to 80 if we include
among the ‘extraordinary’ measures the further bill containing clauses delegating the regulation of
certain matters to the passage of government directives.
We thus find confirmation of the view that, with very little time available, and forced to rely on a
majority that was certainly large but anything but homogeneous, the executive led by Monti
wanted to ‘centralise’ legislative decision-making (the timing and the substance of which it
attempted to regiment through the use of emergency decrees and proposals for the delegation of
powers to the Government) – especially decision-making on the most important measures and
those associated with the programmatic objectives it had set itself.
The success of government proposals in Parliament
How many of the Government’s proposals had, then, become law at the end of the first eight
months of the Government’s term? A quick look to aggregate figures (table 4) reveals that the rate
of success is not large and not as large as one might have expected given the nature of the
government and the need, recognised in many quarters, for it to ‘act effectively and to act quickly’.
The rate of success has certainly been affected by the large number of emergency decrees still in
the process of being converted into ordinary law as we write. However, it suggests that the Monti
Government has had some difficulties in overcoming (in a small amount of time) the resistance (if
not the interlocking vetoes) of a heterogeneous parliamentary majority. This is the interesting
aspect to be highlighted here.
TABLE 4 ABOUT HERE
Coming to a more specific and qualitative analysis, we can easily discover that almost all the
“programmatic measures” introduced by the government have been at the centre of a delicate
and sometimes harsh discussion among the political actors. In order to cope with such an
unfriendly environment, the cabinet has employed the whole set of “defensive” instruments known
in the constitutional practice. The first one is the “coalition summit”, an old governmental practice
consisting in the permanent audit of partisan actors by means of a meeting of party leaders which
flanked the “official” work of the council of ministers since the central decades of the first republic
(Criscitiello1993). However, the organization of the “summits” is difficult in the case of Monti
government, since the party leaderships are weak and such a practice would easily determine the
(nor are we here concerned with the matter) to assess the extent to which the current government has been able to keep it ‘promises’.
14
reactions of the populist opposition16. Thus, Monti had avoided to continually meeting party
leaders in formal arena, calling “secret” meetings or employing alternative methods of
confrontation.
Among these latter, the practice of the “trial and error” method in the law making process has
been also often used: as other technocratic or semi-technical governments did in the recent past,
the executive drafts a given legislative item formally requesting an effort of “improvement” – that
means, leaving room for a few amendments to be negotiated with parliamentary party groups – to
partisan actor. The practice has been followed specially when some policy issues were at the
border of the governmental “emergency delegation”: for instance, the measures concerning cuts in
the public administration, party financing, minor reforms of the judiciary system. On the contrary,
the measures concerning the financial and economic reforms have been characterized by a more
courageous attitude of the government. Monti has also used the most extreme tool, that is to say
menacing his resignation and presenting the danger of a new uncertain political crisis, in a few
occasions, when the pressures from EU and from the market were evident, and the decisions to be
taken became immediate and drastic.
In this perspective, it is not very much surprising to notice that the executive often made
parliamentary approval of its proposals matters of confidence, especially those which (at least in
the Government’s view) were the most urgent and important.This practice has been actually used
in a very selective way: in fact, only 6 percent of the Monti government’s initiatives were made
questions of confidence. However, the confidence votes demanded by the Government in
connection with these twelve measures amounted to fully 2417, revealing that the executive
wanted to oversee (and to minimise the length of) the process of approval of certain initiatives by
having recourse to votes of confidence at every turn in both chambers of Parliament18. Overall, the
monthly average of motions of confidence presented by the government Monti marks a new record
of frequency (2,7), contributing to elevate the growing rate of use of this legislative tool (Table 5).
The diachronic analysis confirms the incremental use of the confidence motion evidenced since the
beginning of the Italian transition (Zucchini 2010). This can be paradoxical in a technocratic
government with a (theoretically) large majority, but the data clearly show that the use of such an
“adversarial tool” can be very different from one government to another: in the case of Monti, for
instance, the legislative majority is each time potentially different from the “inaugural majority”
and the prime minister tries to defend his limited but indispensable policy platform, concentrating
the use of confidence motion on the whole text (short decrees or “maxi-amendments” to whole
decrees) of a few legislative items.
16 Antonio Di Pietro and many IDV MPs have often labeled the convergence named ABC , from the names of the leaders of the parties supporting the government: Alfano (formal leader of Mr. Berlusconi PDL), Bersani (Secretary of PD) and Casini (President of UDC). 17To which should be added three votes of confidence attached by the Monti government to proposals introduced earlier by the outgoing Berlusconi government. 18This happened with the bill to reform the labour market; with the decree concerning simplification and development (decree law no. 5 of 2012); with the decree law concerning competition and competitiveness (no. 1 of 2012). These were all measures that were made matters of confidence both in the Chamber and in the Senate.
15
TABLE 5 ABOUT HERE
Technocratic style of government and the parliamentary floor
A third crucial aspect to be assessed in this exploration is the variability of governmental strategies
on the parliamentary arena, in order to assure the adoption of adequate measures to cope the
crisis. In particular, we are interested here to evaluate the approach followed by the technocratic
government during the final part of the legislature, in comparison to the strategies pursued by the
“normal” political executives.
The instability of the markets in the area of the Euro and the continuous rumors about the default
of different political systems within the EU have forced the executive to make a number of
incremental corrections in its economic measures. This has determined a difficult relationship with
the parliament, since the announced measures have been,in more than one occasion, “overcome”
and somehow substituted by other decisions.
Although the line of “responsibility” pursued by Monti has been so far (we write this paper in
August 2012) successful, some cases of displeasure, if not “rebellion”, within the ranks of the
parliamentary majority has been manifest. Under this point of view, we can roughly distinguish
three different reactions showed by the parliamentary groups of the parties supporting the
cabinet.
The first and simplest attitude is that of the “deference”, which characterizes an undisputable
support and a strong emphasis on the adequacy of the policies put in action by the government.
Usually, this kind of attitude comes together with a full acknowledgement of Monti as a legitimate
chief executive, and a perspective political leader.This kind of attitude is by no doubt typical within
the small centrist group of UDC/API/FLI, whose MPs (in particular those from UDC) have played
since the beginning of the technocratic government the role of its main political sponsor, but this
does not avoid the backbenchers MPs from the centrist group to present specific amendments and
to keep making actions of compromise and constituency service. A recent law reducing the public
financing to parties (n. 96/2012) represents a good example of parliamentary conciliation between
a strong policy position suggested by the cabinet minister and a soft decision reached after
passing a number of individual amendments by single MPs19.
The second attitude showed by single MPs is a general “loyal” support to the main proposals of the
government with specific policy requests advanced time by time. The parliamentary group of the
PD tries to follow this rule, mainly as a result between the position of the majority of the party and
a minority of “moderate reformists”. The bulk of MPs close to the party leader Bersani, seems to
be in fact loyal to the choices developed by Monti but clearly oriented to limit the policy action of
19 12 amendments from individual MPs were passed during the passage at the Chamber of Deputies of this law (five amendments, respectively, from both PD’s deputies and from MPs belonging to the mixed group; one amendment presented by a member of the UDC group; one amendment from a representative of the IDV)
16
the executive to the minimum “emergency plan” and, in any case, always ready to propose
amendments and alternative solutions. The moderate reformists are much closer and attentive to
the indications of the ministers and some of them have also recommended the prolongation of the
technocratic experience for the next legislature.
The third attitude, which is recurrent in the PdL camp, can be called a sort of dubious support. In
this case, the parliamentary party raises a number of “conditions” in order to confirm its formal
support and, in any case, the interest of many MPs, including important front-benchers, to the
governmental initiatives look much less relevant in comparison to the other parties20. In addition to
occasional dealignemnts or to “private” amendments, anumber of cases of “ideological rebellion”
has emerged in the group of PDL during the months of the Monti government: they did not vote
some of the governmental initiatives since they did not consider such proposals sufficiently
“liberal” and marked oriented21.
In other cases, the party was negotiating a legislative package deal (for instance, assuring its
support to a reform oriented to reduce the opportunity of corruption in exchange with a more
reductive use of telephone investigation).
The fragile, although profitable, equilibrium in the majority is not the only changing element of the
parliamentary scenario during the final part of the 16th legislative term: even the “official”
opposition is in fact moving on, in this case in the direction of a clear radicalization. Such a
dynamics is clearly applicable to the MPs of the Northern League, who remained coherent to a
model of hard opposition characterizing already their first reaction to the formation of the
technocratic government. In this case, one could apply a typical “yes-not model”, since the
parliamentary group which had remained united in its support to the Berlusconi government
(notwithstanding an internal division emerged with the sunset of its historical leader Umberto
Bossi) and then united again, in its harsh opposition to the new government.
Even the group of IdV has progressively moved to a antagonistic mode: after voting the inaugural
confidence to the technocratic government, the MPs from Di Pietro’s party have shifted (with some
occasional differentiation) to a radical opposition, contrasting most of the economic measures and
even raising questions about the legitimation of the executive. The motionof individual no-
confidence, presented by IdV, against minister Fornero in the June of 2012 is a clear evidence of
the position of this party.
This dynamics of changing parliamentary scenario, with continuous danger of individual or even
collective “rebellion” from the majority side, and a slim but more and more hostile opposition, had
determined an uneasy life for the technocratic government. This is probably the reason suggesting
Mr. Monti to follow, among the different strategies illustrated in the previous section, a selective
20 It is worth to remember that, during the most relevant votes concerning the economic measures introduced by the Monti government many leaders of the PDL did not take part and in any case they did not speak during the vote declaration. Berlusconi, in particular, was not present in the Chamber. 21 An important and well know PDL MP, Giorgio Stracquadanio, left the PPG just during the spring session of the 2012, in open conflict with the party for a position judged too “permissive”.
17
but strong defense of a handful of decrees representing the core business of governmental
legislation (Table 5).
Discussion and implications
This paper has the only ambition to start a reflection about the meaning of the political change
occurred during a peculiar conjuncture like the 16th legislature of the Italian republic: therefore, we
are not able to bring robust interpretative analyses at the moment. However, what we have
observed so far allows us to answer, although in a rather dubitative form, some of the questions
raised in the introductive section: first of all, we can say that, within the limited space of the
delegation given to the technocratic team, most of the very relevant reforms proposed have
passed with a “bipartisan” consensus: this means that the parliamentary divide between the two
opposing coalitions which have alternated in power since 1994 have been effectively suspended,
thanks to a number of compromises which have made possible a number of reforms impossible to
run until a few months ago.
Secondly, the cost and the limits of this process of technocratic cooperation are evident: above all,
some ideological contestations emerge within the PdL from time to time, constraining the support
of the whole party and, in particular its neo-liberal factions. The PD collaboration seems more
trustable, looking at the parliamentary scenario, but even in this party a clear internal
confrontation among “supporters” of the government and “challengers” is quite manifest.
All in all, the division within all the parliamentary groups (being the same opposition parties, IdV
and LN, not completely safe from the problem of internal factionalisation) and the persistence of
opportunistic approach in many individual MPs constitute a problem for the stability of the cabinet
but even a relevant tool for completing its job of “emergency legislation”. With such a scenario,
the Monti government does not really resemble a “grand coalition” German style, given its political
weakness and its limited delegation, and it is not comparable to a “presidentialized parliamentary
government” with some corrections in terms of technocratic expertise. It is a real interim
government, where the interim mandate is short but dense, limited but crucial. Different from the
care taker governments of the past, the problem of this executive is not to let the time pass but to
struggle with the time in order to complete a number of reforms that under “normal executives”
would be impossible or, at best, very slow and ineffective.
The reflection on the nature (and the applicability over time) of such a model of interim
government has to be done elsewhere. Here we just want to draw two relevant implications for
the discussion of the Italian case in a comparative framework of the relationship between
majorities and opposition in (prolonged) times of crisis. The first implication concerns the model of
democratic confrontation: the Italian democracy arrived to this difficult historical turning point
after about twenty years of uncertain and unproductive transition. The consensus nature of the
“old” democratic regime has been challenged but not really overcome and the elements of
“adversarial” or “competitive” democracy have not taken a consistent and stable form within the
political system. In such a political environment, it is difficult that a “interim government” could get
18
more than its limited delegation allows it to do it, but it is also reasonable to think that the
parliamentary scenario could remain confused enough to allow some form of interim government
to last (or to re-form itself after a new electoral turn), thus prolonging the effect of “suspension” of
the ordinary parliamentary democracy method.
The second implication concerns the role of political parties. No doubt, they are the crucial actor in
this uncertain conjuncture, since they represent the old factor of embeddedness of the classic
representative democracy22 and the only element able to transform the current situation in a
stable and somehow innovative model of, more or less consensus oriented, parliamentary
democracy. An in depth analysis of partisan and parliamentary actor is needed to confirm the
dynamics of change within each party and each parliamentary group, but what we have observed
is clear enough to argue that the current state of political parties is still rather concerning, since
the internal procedures of leadership legitimacy are still indecisive, and the degree of internal
cohesion anyway low. Given such conditions, the perspective to form a large consensus, or a new
robust system of adversarial (but transparent) confrontation seems to be still far to come.
22 An example of lucid and preoccupied reflection on this theme is in the comment of Ilvo Diamanti appeared on the newspaper La Repubblica on 19 August 2012, titled the eclipse of representative democracy (L’eclissi della democrazia rappresentativa).
19
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20
Figure 1. Percentage of ministers and junior ministers in Italian governments without any
parliamentary experience at the time of their appointment: 1987-2011
0102030405060708090
100
Go
ria
De
Mit
a
An
dre
ott
i V
I
An
dre
ott
i V
II
Am
ato
Cia
mp
i
Be
rlu
sc
on
i
Din
i
Pro
di
D'A
lem
a
D'A
lem
a I
I
Am
ato
II
Be
rlu
sc
on
i II
Be
rlu
sc
on
i II
I
Pro
di II
Be
rlu
sc
on
i IV
Mo
nti
Ministers Junior Ministers
Source: CIRCaP, University of Siena
21
Figure 2. Size of governments (ministers, vice-ministers and junior ministers): 1987-2011
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
Go
ria
De
Mit
a
An
dre
ott
i V
I
An
dre
ott
i V
II
Am
ato
Cia
mp
i
Be
rlu
sc
on
i
Din
i
Pro
di
D'A
lem
a
D'A
lem
a I
I
Am
ato
II
Be
rlu
sc
on
i II
Be
rlu
sc
on
i II
I
Pro
di II
Be
rlu
sc
on
i IV
Mo
nti
Ministers Vice-Ministers Junior Ministers
Source: CIRCaP, University of Siena
22
Figure 3. Percentages of members of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies supporting new
governments in inaugural motions of confidence 1987-2011a
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
MontiBerlusconi IV
Prodi IIBerlusconi IIIBerlusconi II
Amato IID'Alema II
D'AlemaProdi
DiniBerlusconi
CiampiAmato
Andreotti VIIAndreotti VI
De MitaGoria
Senate Chamber of Deputies
aThe percentages for the Chamber of Deputies also include abstentions
Source: CIRCaP, University of Siena
23
Table 1.Monti Government's programmatic pledges by areas of intervention
Area of intervention area N. of real pledges % Improvement in the public finances 2 7.41 Implementation of the commitments given to the EU 2 7.41 Reduction in the costs of maintaining elected bodies 2 7.41 Rationalisation of the public administration 5 18.52 Reform of welfare legislation 0 0.00 The fight against tax evasion 2 7.41 The taxation of property 1 3.70 The selling off of publicly-owned real estate 2 7.41 Macro-economic policies to encourage growth 3 11.11 Intervention in the labour market 4 14.81 Micro-economic policies to encourage growth 4 14.81 Total 27 100.00
24
Figure 4. "Programmatic density" of Italian PMs' inaugural speeches: 1996-2011
0
0,5
1
1,5
2
2,5
3
3,5
4
Pro
di_
I
D'A
lem
a_
I_II
Am
ato
_II
Ber
lusc
on
i_II
_II
I
Pro
di_
II
Ber
lusc
on
i_IV
Mo
nti
Source: CIRCaP, University of Siena
25
Table 2. Bills passed by the Cabinet
Source: CIRCaP (as at 28/06/2012)
Source: CIRCaP, University of Siena
Type of bill N % of total
bills
Bills 17 20.7
Ordinary bills 10 12.2
Proposed laws of delegation 6 7.3
Bills including proposals for delegation 1 1.2
Treaty ratifications 39 47.6
Decree laws 26 31.7
Total 82 100
26
Figure 5. Percentage distribution of the Government’s legislative initiatives by type of measure
(treaty ratifications excluded)
Ordinary bills 23,3%
Proposed laws of
delegation 14,0%
Bills including proposals for
delegation 2,3%
Decree laws 60,5%
Source: CIRCaP, University of Siena
27
Table 3. Percentage of government legislative initiatives linked to programmatic objectives
(treaty ratifications excluded)
Type of initiative N %
Bills 6 35.3
Ordinary bills 3 30.0
Proposed laws of delegation 2 33.3
Bills including proposals for delegation 1 100
Decree laws 13 50
Total 19 44,2
Source: CIRCaP, University of Siena
28
Table 4. Rate of success of government initiatives by type of initiative (as at 15/08/2012). Treaty
ratifications excluded
Type of initiative N %
Bills 2 11.8
Ordinary bills 1 10.0 Proposed laws of delegation 0 0 Bills including proposals for delegation 1 100 Decree laws 24 92.3
Total 26 60.5
29
Table 5. Motions of confidence presented by the government on legislative item (1987-2012)
Legislative term One or
more
articles
One or more
amendments
“Unique
article”
Maxi-amendment
(completely
substituting the bill)
Total Montly
average
X (1987-1992)
7 3 6 2 18 0,31
XI (1992-1994)
4 0 8 1 13 0,54
XII (1994-1996)
1 3 1 1 6 0,24
XIII (1996-2001)
0 3 15 9 27 0,44
XIV (2001-2006)
2 2 14 26 44 0,73
XV (2006-2008)
2 1 7 11 21 0,91
XVI (2008-…)
5 0 34 26 65 1,27
Total 21 12 85 76 194 0,77