ABSTRACT

This chapter explores what the Italian Parliament does and how satisfactorily it performs. It assesses its transformations through time and, especially, its relationships with the government and evaluates the proposals for additional changes. In all parliamentary democracies, parliaments have important political tasks and carry out many activities that cannot be left to any other institution. In 1971, through a reform of the parliamentary rules, more power was given to Parliament on several issues, uppermost among them the power to set the agenda. The sociological representativeness of the Italian Parliament was not sufficient to exempt it from being criticized, but for a long time, at least until the late 1980s, anti-parliamentarism was less than virulent. More precisely, Parliament is an arena where the government and the opposition encounter each other and play a complex game to their own advantage and to that of public opinion.