Fighting Corona on Democratic Terms. Post-legislative scrutiny in Italy and Denmark during the pandemic

The Corona crisis poses a dual challenge to parliaments (Bar-Siman-Tov 2020; Chaplin 2020). On the one hand, they were asked to act quickly to provide governments with resources and powers to respond to the pandemic in a swift and effective way. On the other hand, assemblies were forced to work, at least in part, from remote as a way to respect the social distancing measures governing the emergency. While recent reports show that, despite difficult circumstances, parliaments have kept operating (Ibid.), little is still known about how parliaments adapted and the deeper implications of the Corona crisis for parliamentary functions. This paper focuses on the oversight function exercised by the parliament over the executive and more specifically on the phase of post-legislative scrutiny. Governments around the world have initiated significant regulations of economic, social and private life to fight Covid19. They have done so via decree laws or fast-track legislative procedures trying to react as fast as needed to the developing crisis. Our expectation is that both time pressure and logistic difficulties severely limited the possibility of parliamentary ex-ante control, which therefore had to move to the post-legislative phase (Griglio 2019). Studies of post-legislation control are rather limited (Borghetto 2018). Regarding the current Corona crisis, we do not know which mechanisms have been installed to monitor governments’ increased power. We do not know their status legally and politically. And we do not know whether such control mechanisms have been activated or not. These are all important insights for understanding how democratic institutions like parliament deal with urgent crisis management. The way democratic institutions are equipped to fight crises without losing democratic control is crucial for the current Corona crisis as well as for future crises. This paper compares parliamentary post-legislative scrutiny of government regulations related to the Corona crisis across two highly different parliamentary systems. Italy is a large two chamber parliament with low party and government stability. The corona crisis hit the country hard and at an early phase of the pandemics, putting under stress an already limited public budget. Denmark is a small single chamber parliament with high party and government stability. The country was not as severely hit by the virus and had substantial resources to support the economy during the crisis. Empirically, it develops an analysis of all primary and secondary legislation related to Corona in both countries. It compares: 1) the way parliaments passed emergency legislation; 2) which executive actors were most involved in the post-legislative phase and through which legislative instruments; 3) which control mechanisms were activated by the parliament to hold the cabinet accountable; 4) the role of opposition forces in this endeavor. The paper has two ambitions. First, we aim to contribute to the evaluation of how parliamentary systems handle Covid19 providing helpful knowledge of how to handle similar crises now and in the future. Second, we wish to launch a general research agenda focused on parliamentary post-legislation scrutiny contributing to knowledge about how parliaments deal with increasing amounts of secondary legislation.