Legislative process in Italy has traditionally been described as a consensual process (Allum 1973; Blondel 1988; Cotta 1990; Di Palma 1976; Furlong 1990; Hine 1993; Spotts and Wieser 1986). Since the actors involved in the lawmaking adopt cooperative practices from the introduction of bills to the final voting, governmental legislation is expected to be approved through a consensual process, with the involvement of legislators from both the majority and the opposition. Recent studies on Italian lawmaking have shown that this consensual style seems to have persisted even after the end of the so called First Republic and the shift from a pivotal to an alternational party system (Capano and Giuliani 2001a,b; 2003a,b).
Studying the length of legislative process thus allows to understand how the members of the Italian opposition use their right to delay the parliamentary passage of government bills, and to investigate which are the differences (if any) between the First and the Second Republic.
In this paper, I test a number of theoretically relevant explanations of the length of legislative process. Besides the conflict between government and opposition and the impact of different party systems, the hypotheses tested concern policy divisions within the governing coalition (Martin and Vanberg 2004, 2011), logrolling and distributive logics (Weingast and Marshall 1988), and the level of information at political actors’s disposal during the legislative process (Krehbiel 1991).
In order to empirically evaluate the hypotheses derived from these arguments, I built an original dataset tracking the legislative history of all the governmental laws introduced in the Italian Chamber of Deputies between 1987 and 2006.
