Abstract
What happens once the government has outlined its spending priorities in the budget bill? Can it protect them against the intervention of the two chambers of the Italian parliament? To what extent is the European Commission able to induce changes to the nationally agreed allocation of expenditure? This chapter assesses the balance of power between the three fundamental actors intervening during the budgetary decision-making process by measuring the degree of expenditure reallocation across budget categories between the budget bill and the budget law of the same year. Findings show a blatant pattern of power concentration in the government’s hands to the detriment of the parliamentary prerogatives. The result is that the Italian budget is now nearly unmanageable even for a strong majority. Theoretically, the government would have all the tools to steer a long-term budget policy. Practically, the cognitive frictions of governing policy-makers crush any potential achievements.
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Notes
- 1.
This occurs according to the Italian rules of procedure, which entail the reading and approval by the V Committee of the Chamber of Deputies and V Committee of the Senate and also of both Chambers.
- 2.
As carried out in Chap. 6, for the sake of knowledge the percentage change of the size of the total budget is considered and presented in the Appendix (Tables A.14–A.16).
- 3.
The exact sentence is cited in Pedrazzani and Zucchini (2013: 687).
- 4.
As in Chap. 6, I check the Duncan dissimilarity index (Duncan and Duncan 1955) and the index of budget distance (Tsebelis and Chang 2004), and evaluate their similarity to the index of transformativeness. The high correlation demonstrates the reliability in the index of transformativeness, thus I stick with this measure as already used in previous studies (Cavalieri et al. 2018; Cavalieri 2020) (correlation between index of transformativeness and Duncan dissimilarity index: 0.95, statistically significant with p-value < 0.001; correlation between index of transformativeness and index of budget distance: 0.97, statistically significant with p-value < 0.001).
- 5.
See Table A.14 in the Appendix for the index of transformativeness of each year, between the budget bill(t) and the budget law(t) (analysed in this chapter) and between the budget law(t–1) and the budget bill(t) (analysed in Chap. 6), and Table A.15 for summary statistics of the index of transformativeness.
- 6.
Overall, years prior to elections (value 1) correspond to 23.3 per cent of the total while years when elections were not held make up the remaining 76.7 per cent.
- 7.
- 8.
After checking the assumptions that must be met in order to run an OLS regression, I found that the transformativeness value of the budget for 1998 (16.17), which is the highest value on by the index, affects the assumption. The OLS is run excluding it. Table A.16 in the Appendix shows the results of the OLS regression using the percentage change of the total size of the budget as a dependent variable.
- 9.
The Conte II government was composed by the populist M5S and the mainstream centre-left Democratic Party and minor parties such as IV and LeU which entered into office after the collapse of the Conte I government, where M5S was governing with the radical-right League (Passarelli and Tuorto 2018), forming the first fully fledged populist government in Italy and in Western Europe (D’Alimonte 2019).
- 10.
Senate, Ass. res. sten. sed. 23/12/2021, p. 56 (Renzi).
- 11.
The secretary of the Presidency of the Chamber and member of the opposition Mauro del Bue maintained that that was ‘a sliced financial bill; after all, the outcome produced by a sliced majority […] can be at best a sliced financial bill, result of thousands of conflicts, thousands of problems, thousands of demands; a never-ending financial bill because of never-ending conflicts, never-ending problems, never-ending demands’ (Camera, Ass., res. sten. sed. 9/11/2006, p. 38 (Del Bue) (own translation).
- 12.
Basically, the President of the Senate claimed that he gauged the unique maxi-amendment admissible only because it was based meticulously on the limits set by the previous draft scrutinised by the assembly and the acceptable amendments had already been submitted by the majority and the Committee (Camera, Ass., res. sten. sed. 17/11/2006, p. 12).
- 13.
Because the government could not modify the text of the maxi-amendment at that stage of the budgetary process, it ensured that it would have later abrogated the norms with a specific decree.
- 14.
Interview with Dr Chiara Bergonzini (6/12/2019).
- 15.
The qualitative study of some annual manovre described in Chaps. 6 and 7 used a historical perspective with the purpose of interpreting the actors’ role and their decision-making power, and to unravel the complexity of interacting factors in joint decision-making processes (Scharpf 1988, 1997, 2000). To do so, in addition to the data available and already used to conduct the statistical analysis, I traced the pattern of events through the scrutiny of parliamentary debates and documents, and interviewed Dr Chiara Bergonzini.
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Cavalieri, A. (2023). The Impact of the Decision-Making Process. In: Italian Budgeting Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15447-8_7
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