Looking beyond the aggregate figures: An investigation of the consensual approval of Italian government bills

Policymaking in contemporary parliamentary democracies appears to be dominated by executives. The vast majority of legislative proposals are drafted in governmental offices, and most of these bills become laws (see Andeweg and Nijzink 1995; Gamm and Huber 2002). Still, legislatures seem to retain a fundamental role in the lawmaking process. Legislative bodies are not merely ‘rubber stamps’ for governmental proposals. As a growing research programme has illustrated, during the legislative process, parliamentary institutions are employed by coalition parties to manage the tensions arising among them and make joint policy (Martin and Vanberg 2004, 2005, 2011). Moreover, all major policy initiatives normally require the final approval of parliament, and hence investigating what happens in the precise stage when parliamentary approval is given can be extremely informative. Which is the outcome of the parliamentary voting stage? Are bills supported by a scanty majority of legislators, or do they enjoy the votes of very large portions of the assembly? Most of all, are bills backed just by the representatives forming the legislative majority, or do they (also) receive the votes of members of the opposition? Analysing the parliamentary voting stage can thus be useful for an evaluation of the level of cooperation among the legislators (and the parties) that are present in the assembly, as well as for a deeper understanding of the dynamics between executive and legislative and the relationships within the legislative majority.1 Undoubtedly, the topic is especially relevant for government-sponsored legislation. In the case of the bills initiated by the executive, a wide support in the assembly means that at least part of the opposition is voting with the majority. The study of the parliamentary support for government legislation seems particularly interesting in Italy’s Second Republic. As commonly acknowledged, despite harsh confrontation between parties in the public debate, Italian legislation (including government bills) has usually been approved by very large parliamentary majorities (e.g., Di Palma 1977; Giuliani 1997), and the consensualism characterizing Italian lawmaking seems to have survived even the end of the First Republic and the shift to the alternational and (would-be) majoritarian Second Republic (Capano and Giuliani 2001a, 2001b, 2003). Up to now, the literature on Italy has primarily focused on the aggregate figures of the degree of support gained by laws at the final voting stage in the parliament, while the internal differences between more and less consensual processes remain a rather understudied topic (Giuliani 2008). However, a deeper inspection reveals that not all the bills introduced by the Italian governments are approved in a consensual manner. Their approval can be more universal in some cases, and more strictly majoritarian in others. Aiming to investigate such a variance, this work will analyse data on the legislative production of Italian governments over a relatively long period of time (1988–2008). The chosen time span thus covers four Second Republic legislatures and, as a point of comparison, two First Republic parliamentary terms. This chapter is organized as follows. The next section presents the Italian case, focusing on the consensual patterns of lawmaking emphasized in the literature, and in particular on the remarkable degree of support that, on average, legislation receives in the Italian parliament. Trying to go one step further, the third section discusses a number of theoretical explanations that can account for variation in the level of consensus through which government legislation is passed in parliament. The considered explanatory hypotheses are drawn both from the comparative research on parliamentary systems and from the literature on the U.S. Congress. This work also assesses the impact of two original factors that are specifically related to the processes through which bills are approved: the length of the legislative process and the extent to which bills are modified in parliament before approval. Taking into account these two important process-related aspects that are particularly relevant in the Italian case contributes to explaining what happens at the final voting stage in the parliament. The fourth section introduces the dataset and describes the dependent variables employed in my analyses, while the operationalization of the independent variables is discussed in the fifth section. The results of the analyses are illustrated in the sixth section, and concluding remarks are presented in the final section