The Italian Parliament: the ambiguous performance of the almighty legislator

The present paper is going to focus on the legislative performance of the Italian parliament, which constitutes a very interesting case, given that academic studies tend to present differing opinions of the various features of Parliament’s legislative performance and role. Though the Italian Parliament has its idiosyncratic features, the majority of the variance in interpretation of its legislative performance is due to the confusion with which the concept of performance has been handled in academic studies, and to the operationalization of that concept Hence before dealing with the empirical data in the second section, the author is first going to try and work on the concepts of legislative performance and legislative power. In the third section, a longitudinal view of the Italian case is presented: this is of considerable interest because, among other things, from 1992 onwards many deeply-rooted features of Italian politics changed radically, and some of them directly altered the way parliament works (for instance, the choice of a semi-majoritarian electoral system in 1993, or the constitutional reform introduced in 2001 giving greater legislative power and responsibility to the Regions). In the fourth section, a quantitative analysis of legislative performance since 1987 is presented (comparing the first two legislatures elected using the old electoral system with the three elected using the new system). This data will be discussed in an attempt to answer the following questions: how important is the Italian Parliament in legislative terms, and what degree of control does Parliament exercise over the legislative process compared with the Government ? In doing so, the focus is concentrated on some figures on the amendatory process (obtained by elaborating a very large amount – more than 60,000 - of amendments proposed during the course of the last two legislatures). The figures regarding the said amendments are of considerable importance to an understanding of the specific contribution made by the Italian legislature to the contents of legislation. The fifth and final section will try to provide an interpretation of the general picture offered by the data presented, and to gain some theoretical and empirical lessons from the Italian case which will be of use to the advancement of theoretical and empirical research into the evaluation and classification of legislative power and parliamentary performance.