Divided Government, Italian Style: The Italian Policy-Making Process in Bicameral Perspective

Italian bicameralism, because of its highly symmetric system which requires the government to command a majority in both chambers of parliament, is considered very “redundant”. For most of the post-war period, when the electoral laws used to elect the two chambers resulted in identical partisan compositions, this was probably true. However, following an electoral reform in 2005, the two chambers became a lot less congruent in partisan terms, making it harder to form a viable government coalition in both houses. This development makes Italian bicameralism less redundant, and it also makes Italy an ideal case to investigate how governments handle a parliamentary environment which resembles a situation of divided government. This paper argues that higher bicameral incongruence (measured as the disparity between the distribution of seats among government parties in the two chambers of parliament) increases the ideological spread of government coalitions, affecting the bargaining that the main government party has to undertake with coalition partners and backbenchers in order to get its bills through parliament. The paper uses a mixed-methods approach, firstly presenting statistical findings that show how bicameral incongruence increases the government’s use of prerogative instruments (such as legislative decrees and confidence votes), and the rates of amendments presented to government bills. Secondly, qualitative case studies employ process tracing to reconstruct the effects of incongruence by comparing the parliamentary passage of two education bills during times of low and high incongruence, with an emphasis on which actors managed to win concessions during the bargaining process. By conceptualising the causal effects of bicameral incongruence, this study has implications for the wider literature on bicameralism, coalition government and executive-legislative relations.