Decision-Making Capacity and Policy Innovation: Three Italian governments in comparative perspective

The first and foremost task of all governments is to make decisions: in the very end, governments must govern, and should therefore be analysed (and, in turn, evaluated) on the basis of what they did, what they did not, and what they did badly. Over the course of the so-called ‘First Republic’, scholars generally referred to Italian governments as ‘surviving without governing’ actors: indeed, legislation resulted very often in micro-distributive policies rather than in ‘big reforms’. This was especially due to the institutional setting, which strengthened the legislature vis-à-vis the executive, as well as to a proportional electoral system favouring multi-party governments and preventing alternation in office. This picture started changing in the early 1990: both endogenous and exogenous factors led to the re-organisation of the previous party system, while electoral and (micro-)institutional reforms turned party competition into bipolar, as well as strengthened government vis-à-vis parliament. After a brief period of uncertainty and deep crisis coinciding with the 1992-1996 transition, all these changes greatly enhanced government resources. As a consequence, several empirical studies started challenging the imagine of Italian executives as being irremediably weak and unable to pass significant legislation. With regard to legislative performance, this paper focuses on three Italian governments, namely the first Prodi cabinet (1996-98), the second Berlusconi cabinet (2001-06), and the Renzi cabinet (2014-). Yet, this comparison is innovative in many respects: above all, we compare governmental action both quantitatively and qualitatively. On the one hand, we assess the degree of cabinets legislative productivity and capability of passing ‘big reforms’; on the other, we also ‘measure’ how much policy innovation characterised their main political decisions, as well as to what extent policy aims and policy designs were in accordance with one another. This is highly relevant, and represents the main added value of this paper: we know from the literature that alternation in office, government cohesion and agenda-setting powers tend to increase government decision-making capacity. Yet, this claim has been verified only from a quantitative point of view. However, taking many decisions is different from taking ‘good’ decisions, and causal conditions may vary accordingly. In order to compare governments qualitatively, in this paper we refer to nine ‘big reforms’ – three for each cabinet – which have been approved in three policy sectors: education, labour market, and institutional setting. The measurement of policy innovation, as well as of the (potential) correspondence between political aims and policy designs is obtained through an expert survey: policy specialists have been asked to evaluate each issue of each piece of legislation under scrutiny. It seems to be that – in recent years – Italy has passed from being the country of no reforms, to a country in which reforming activity is permanent; yet, is this widespread belief empirically demonstrable? And, much more important: were these reforms internally coherent and policy innovative? After a long period of inaction, Italian governments started ‘doing’ things; yet whether those things are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ should be empirically tested.