Italy

Datasets

We have coded the following documents:

• Laws (1983-2021) and Legislative decrees (1987-2018). This dataset is partially incorporated in the Italian Law-Making Archive (ILMA), a database recording information about all Italian legislative processes from 1987 to 2008. The ILMA database is managed by the Department of Social and Political Sciences.
• Party Manifestoes (1979-2022)
• Budget (1990-2007)
• Sentences of the Constitutional Court (1956-2006)
• Prime Minister's investiture speeches (1979-2022)
• Oral parliamentary questions (1996-2023)

In the future, we plan to include data on the priorities of public opinion, mass-media and bills.

Parliamentary & Legislative

• Legislative decrees

  Legislative decrees are primary legislative acts adopted by the cabinet after receiving an authorization by the Parliament through a delegation act. The latter has to specify the principles and criteria and establish time criteria and purposes of the delegation.  

  If you use the data, please cite the following article:

  Borghetto E (2018) Delegated decree authority in a parliamentary system: the exercise of legislative delegation in Italy (1987–2013). The Journal of Legislative Studies 24(2): 179–196. DOI: 10.1080/13572334.2018.1439441.

  
  1267 observations spanning the years 1988 to 2013
  download dataset   download codebook
• Primary laws

  This dataset contains all primary laws adopted by the Italian parliament (both Chamber of Deputies and Senate) between October 1983 (the 9th legislature started on 12 July 1983) and February 2013 (the 16th legislature ended on 14 March 2013). CAP topic codes have been manually coded by two coders working independently. The final data set does not include Constitutional Laws.

  If you use the data, please cite the following article:

  Carammia M, Borghetto E and Bevan S (2018) Changing the transmission belt: the programme-to-policy link in Italy between the First and Second Republic. Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica 48(3): 275–288. DOI: 10.1017/ipo.2018.13.

  
  4554 observations spanning the years 1983 to 2013
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• Question Time

  This dataset includes information about questions asked during the weekly question time session (Interrogazioni a risposta immediata in assemblea) in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Question time is held once per week, usually on Wednesday, and questions must be submitted the day before through the president of the parliamentary group. Each group can present only one oral question per week. Questions for question time must address a topic of general and urgent interest, and the debate on these questions is televised on the public broadcast company. The rules governing question time have been introduced in the Rules of Procedure of the Chamber of Deputies in 1997 (rule 135-bis), but already in 1996 some sessions were held to test the new rules.

  4535 observations covering the period 1996-2014

  If you use the data, please cite the following article:

  Russo F and Cavalieri A (2016) The Policy Content of the Italian Question Time. A New Dataset to Study Party Competition. Rivista Italiana di Politiche Pubbliche 11(2): 197–222.

  
  4535 observations spanning the years 1996 to 2014
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Prime Minister & Executive

• Investiture speeches

  The cabinet agenda is captured through the quasi-sentence coding of Italian investiture speeches. After being appointed by the President of the Republic, every candidate Prime Minister is required to deliver a speech in front of both houses before the confidence vote (he/she has to win a majority of votes on both occasions before officially taking office). In part, these declarations contain a political analysis of the events leading to the cabinet investiture, in part they are used to set officially and publicly (these are highly mediatised events) the cabinet agenda for the rest of the mandate. The time horizon of cabinets can vary and this affects the content of speeches. Some are delivered at the beginning of the 5-year parliamentary term (first government formation after the elections) and are normally longer and wider in scope. Others follow a coalition crisis and the withdrawal of the confidence on the part of the Parliament. In such circumstances, the Constitution allows the President of the Republic to explore the feasibility of new parliamentary coalitions before calling for early elections. Historically, political forces often preferred these “parliamentary” solutions, so it has been rather common having cabinet reshuffles and new investiture votes during the same legislative term.

  If you use the data, please cite the following article:

  Borghetto E, Visconti F and Michieli M (2017) Government Agenda-Setting in Italian Coalitions. Testing the «Partisan Hypothesis» Using Italian Investiture Speeches 1979- 2014. Rivista Italiana di Politiche Pubbliche (2/2017): 193–220. DOI: 10.1483/87214.

  
  This dataset is not available in the trends tool.
  download dataset   download codebook

Judiciary

• Italian Constitutional Court sentences

  Decisions of constitutional illegitimacy under incidental review of the Italian Constitutional Court (1983-2013)

  If you use the data, please cite the following article:

  Rebessi E and Zucchini F (2018) The role of the Italian Constitutional Court in the policy agenda: persistence and change between the First and Second Republic. Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica 48(3). DOI: 10.1017/ipo.2018.12.

  
  1167 observations spanning the years 1983 to 2013
  download dataset   download codebook

download master topics codebook