Formal models of bureaucracy have attracted significant attention as a systematic body of theory in the past decades. Scholars in this tradition examine institutions and organizations, uncovering incentives that can explain and help to design governance. Scholars in the rational choice tradition study the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats as an incomplete contracting problem between a political principal and a bureaucratic agent. When elected representatives delegate policymaking authority to an administrative agency, they face hidden action problems when the agency takes unobservable actions, and hidden information problems when there are things about agency policy preferences that representatives cannot easily learn. A wide variety of bureaucratic policymaking problems can be modeled as variations on these information problems. Formal theorists have considered resources and discretionary authority as variables that can be optimized to mitigate agency problems, and the models have both positive and normative implications.

This paper investigates towards which policy issues Italian political parties oriented their commitments in the run-up to the 2022 parliamentary election. Do parties make more promises in salient domains? Or, do they prioritise those issues in which they enjoy ownership? To answer these questions, we created a novel dataset that contains 3,992 election pledges made by Italian political parties in the 2022 electoral campaign. By looking at the programmatic policies included in the campaign manifestos of the main political parties and coalitions during the last general election, we find that Italian parties seem to compete around the same issues. In particular, in 2022 a large share of election promises was devoted to economic and social matters. Although the Ukrainian war, the resulting energy crisis, and the implementation of EU-funded investments were the backdrop to the 2022 electoral campaign, Italian political parties do not seem to prioritize these issues.

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