ABSTRACT
This article explores the extent to which the Italian parliament’s capacity to influence the content of public policy (that is, laws) has been affected by the transformation of the party system in the early 1990s and the new electoral law introduced in 1993. As is well known, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Tangentopoli corruption scandal triggered a political upheaval that led to the emergence of a new, bipolar, party system in place of the tri-polar system that had been a central feature of Italian politics since the war. This development was itself bound up with the replacement of the highly proportional system used for parliamentary elections by a new system, which provided for the election of three-quarters of the members of parliament on the basis of the single-member simple plurality system and one-quarter proportionally. Since it is reasonable to assume that the characteristics of party systems will affect the legislative performance (that is, ‘policy power’) of assemblies, analysis of the Italian parliament offers the opportunity to undertake an intra-country comparison of a ‘before and after’ kind – thereby allowing one (if Italy can in some sense be taken as a ‘representative case’) to draw some conclusions about the conditions under which party-system change of the kind mentioned will affect legislative performance in parliamentary systems in general.
