The emergence and spread of the Covid-19 emergency in Italy, as in the rest of the world, required parliaments to balance two priorities: ensuring the continuity of parliamentary work and protecting the health of their members and staff. If, in some …
Want to know more about the impact of #COVID19 pandemic on governments and parliaments in Italy and abroad?
Have a look at this #IdPS Interdisciplinary Political Studies Special Issue edited by Andrea Pedrazzani & myself and sponsored by the #SISP Stading Group “Government Parliament Representation”
Online participation in the Youth Political Representation Research Network’s first workshop, “Youth without representation: discovering the mechanisms behind youth’s underrepresentation in elected bodies”, organised by the University of Ottawa.
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged parliamentary decision-making, which is normally based on time-consuming deliberation and scrutiny. We ask how national parliaments met this challenge during the first wave in the spring 2020, and we argue that institutional powers of the executive designed to handle crises just like a pandemic, paradoxically, increase challenges to democratic decision-making because the parliament misses opportunities to negotiate institutional adjustments accommodating pressure of government takeover. We evaluate this argument based on a comparative study of parliamentary activity in Italy and Denmark during the first wave of COVID-19 and find that both parliaments came under pressure with regard to law-making and control, but only the Danish parliament was able to install effective mechanisms to regain lost powers. It is too early to conclude on parliamentary consequences of COVID-19, but our study suggests that parliamentary reforms in response to the COVID-19 democratic challenges will mainly manifest in political systems without strong institutions to handle states of emergency.
Check out the latest Special Issue in the Italian Political Science Review (2018, 48, n.3) devoted to “Policy Agendas in Italy”. Guest editors: @EBorghetto M.Carammia @FedRusso. With articles on: the Programme-to-policy link, Constitutional Court, Public opinion priorities, Public spending, Decentralization reforms, Immigration.
Policy agendas studies analyse the dynamics of attention to policy issues over time and across actors and institutions to obtain insights into the functioning of political systems. The articles in this special issue draw on this approach to …
The substantial increase in the delegation of legislative powers from the parliament to the executive has been singled out as one of the most prominent changes in the Italian political system of the last three decades. It has given traditionally weak …