Italian coalitions and electoral promises: assessing the democratic performance of the Prodi I and Berlusconi II governments

Abstract

Italian party coalitions (from both the centre-left and the centre-right) have enacted an average of 57% of the pledges included in their common manifestos. In relative terms, Italian political parties keep their electoral promises much less than parties governing in single-party government, but slightly outperform those that form post-electoral coalitions. Although this finding contradicts the widespread pessimism about Italy's performance, it also illustrates that there is no significant advantage to bipolarism and the existence of a common programme as opposed to situations where coalitions are formed after the elections. This might explain Italians' dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in their country.

Party, coalition, premiership: the role of Silvio Berlusconi in coalition dynamics and its determinants

“…10 One of the most evident novelties of the Second Republic was the bipolar nature of party competition, which took place between two coalitions: one of the centre right, the other of the centre left. 11 Coalitions were now assembled before elections (Golder 2006) and stipulated pre-electoral coalition agreements (Moury and Timmermans 2008;Moury 2010Moury , 2011. In contrast to the situation during the First Republic, all parties represented in Parliament were parties enjoying coalition potential (Sartori 2005).…”

populism in europe: everywhere and nowhere?

“…To answer this general question one could have profited from two elements that are missing here. First the comparative evidence available on the fulfilment of election pledges would have put these data in a different perspective (Moury, 2011 has shown that Italian governments of both coalitions to be near the bottom in the ranking of promises fulfilled by governments in Europe). Second, the use of data on voting motivations from the national election studies (in Italy, Itanes, and in Switzerland, the Fors survey) would have shown the motivations of the voters rather than those of the 'insiders'.…”

Intersections. Eejsp_vol2_no1

“…Recent pledge research (Kostadinova, 2013;Toros, 2015;Praprotnik, 2015;Thomson et al, 2014;Naurin, 2013;Dobos and Gyulai, 2015) mostly takes inspiration from a small selection of classic pieces in pledge research (Royed, 1996;Artés, 2013;Artés and Bustos, 2008;Naurin, 2011;Moury, 2011;Mansergh and Thomson, 2007;Costello and Thomson, 2008; and the APSA papers by a group of first generational pledge scholars: Thomson et al, 2010; and the theoretical literature these classic pieces make reference to.…”