Abstract
Previous research has proved that a high level of consensus in the law-making process can be found in the European parliamentary democracies. This consensual pattern of behaviour cannot be explained by the systemic factors traditionally believed to account for the variation in the opposition among countries. The Italian case demonstrates that none of the noteworthy changes that occurred in the political system over the last 20 years have affected the amount of consensus between government and opposition. The aim of the present article is to explore which factors might influence the (more or less) consensual conduct of the Italian parliamentary opposition in the law-making process and, in doing so, to contribute to the progress of research in this field.
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Notes
In support to this assumption, see also the Journal of Legislative Studies, 14: 1, 2008 and, in particular, Helms (2008) and Norton’s (2008) contributions.
The new government coalition was formed by Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left) – composed of former Communist Party (PCI) members who had agreed with the party transformation of the early 1990s – and Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian Popular Party), which had formed a new alliance together with some other minor centre parties and the Greens: Ulivo (Olive Tree). Rifondazione Comunista (Refounded Communist Party) gave its external support to the government until 1998, but did not officially take part in it.
The UDC was the result of the union of the former Centro Cristiano Democratico (CCD) with another small Christian Democratic party.
The former Ulivo coalition was renamed as L’Unione (The Union) and was enlarged to cover a wider range of centre-left parties: Democratici di Sinistra (Democrats of Left), Margherita (Daisy), Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation Party), Partito dei Comunisti Italiani (Party of Italian Communist), Federation of the Greens, Italia dei Valori and some other minor parties and movements.
An important issue should be addressed here. Intra-party heterogeneity and different level of party discipline might, in fact, affect the level of consensus that we measure. This could introduce exogenous factors into the picture and we should take this into consideration. However, recent studies have showed that the traditional image of the discipline of the Italian parties is still valid, at least in the field of legislative voting (Curini et al 2011). In light of these results, we consider the level of party discipline as almost constant across parties (with some specifications that we will introduce later on).
Here we assume that MPs belonging to a given party share the same basic policy preferences. We are aware that this is a questionable assumption, as showed by the extant research estimating MPs policy preferences from their voting behaviour (Poole and Rosenthal, 1997; Poole, 2005) or legislative discourse (Proksch and Slapin, 2010; Slapin and Proksch, 2008). However, as formally our dependent variable is a (group by group) aggregation of individual behaviours, we need a more general measure. We are confident that the position of each party on a given policy space (see below for the discussion on the estimation of such a position) provides a sufficiently reliable measure on this regard. In fact, generally speaking it can be expected that, notwithstanding individual differences, the preferences of (most of) the MPs belonging to a given opposition party group are closer to the position of this group than to the preferences of the government (especially when the latter are far from the preferences of the same group.
Those data were available thanks to the Italian Law-Making Archive of the Standing Group of the Italian Political Science Association (www.sociol.unimi.it/ricerca/parlamento).
We treat abstentions as a form of consensual behaviour and consequently place them at the numerator together with the ayes. This is so because the internal rules of the Italian Chamber of Deputies do not consider abstentions as valid votes for the calculation of the majority necessary to approve a bill (despite counting them to reach the legal quorum). As a consequence, abstaining has the ‘technical’ effect of lowering the number of ayes necessary for a bill to be approved by the voting MPs (facilitating the satisfaction of the legal quorum criterion). Following a similar logic, we consider absences as a particular kind of conflictual behaviour: the opposition party members might choose absenteeism for either symbolic or strategic reasons: in order to respectively publicly dissociate themselves from a given legislative proposal or try to prevent the Chamber reaching the legal quorum. We consequently stopped examining the UDC voting behaviour from that time until the end of the term.
Note that the number of voted laws is identical for each group in the same legislature. The only exception is the UDC in the XIII legislature, because this group split up in the middle of the term because of some defections and its remaining members had to join the Mixed Group.
We used the score of the median party within the cabinet coalition to estimate the position of the government on the left–right continuum.
For further details, see the Comparative Policy Agendas Project at www.comparativeagendas.org.
Any time a bill is introduced to the parliament, it is contextually submitted to the standing parliamentary committee, which is entitled to deal with the main policy area at stake. The committee starts to examine – and even modify – the bill before sending it to the floor. Depending on the content of the bill and as a consequence on the number of policy areas directly or indirectly tackled by the same legislative proposal, further standing committees might be asked to give their opinion on it. Hence, the number of advisory committees involved in the examination of the bill might be seen as a proxy of its policy scope and comprehensiveness. As a result, we can expect that the number of advisory committees to which the bill has been sent is positively associated with the amount of different policy issues it deals with.
Statistical estimations have been made using Stata 11. Data and code for replication are available upon request.
In order to deal with the risk of collinearity between Ideology and Issue divisiveness, we have also tested two other models that alternatively exclude one of the two variables in question. The results, however, are not substantially altered.
Note that further models were estimated to check interaction effects between our covariates. However, none of the interaction terms proved to be statistically significant. Therefore, we decided not to show these models. To check for the robustness of our results, we also estimated a series of models with policy area dummies, as well as models where standard errors are clustered, alternatively, by laws, legislative terms and cabinets. All these analyses do not substantially alter the results presented here.
With the other control variables settled at their mean (party size and government cohesion) or modal values (which is equal to 0 for XV legislature).
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Elisabetta De Giorgi wrote the first and second section of the article, whereas Francesco Marangoni wrote the third and fourth. Introduction and conclusions are the result of a common work.
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De Giorgi, E., Marangoni, F. Government laws and the opposition parties’ behaviour in parliament. Acta Polit 50, 64–81 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2013.34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2013.34