Italian Political Parties and Military Operations: An Empirical Analysis on Voting Patterns

Abstract

Since the end of the bipolar era, the military activism of several Western powers has raised questions about parliamentary control, fostering growing research and analyses on the features, drivers and consequences of the different kinds of oversight exercised by legislative assemblies. Within this scholarly debate, this article focuses on the under-studied case of Italy. How did Italian parties vote on military operations abroad in the post-Cold War era? In order to answer this question, the article presents the first detailed and comprehensive set of data on parliamentary votes over the deployment of the Italian armed forces in the post-Cold War era (i.e. from the beginning of the 1990s to the recent operation against ISIL). Thanks to this extensive new empirical material, the article assesses selected arguments developed by the literature on political parties and foreign policy, paving the way for further research.

The barking dogs: junior coalition partners and military operations abroad in Italy

“…On the other hand, LN did not consider participation in the air strikes against the Libyan regime as a crucial issue per se and, conversely, was not afraid of making the government fall for other reasons. In line with Coticchia and Vignoli (2018), this finding suggests a variation in extreme parties' opposition to troop deployments during this period in Italy: while extreme-left parties rooted their dissent on profound pacifist beliefs, LNs had a more instrumental approach.…”

“…In fact, it explains why coalition cabinets composed by parties with supposedly diverging point of views on this issue managed to survive. Furthermore, in line with Coticchia and Vignoli (2018), the article highlights variation in extreme partners' opposition to MOA in Italy: more 'ideological' for extreme-left parties and more instrumental for LN.…”

“…In order to explain this outcome, I analyse and compare two cases of Notably, the increasing involvement in MOAs represents the most transformative element in post-Cold War Italian foreign policy (Coticchia, 2011;Ignazi et al, 2012;Carati and Locatelli, 2017). A few works underline how such a development was fostered by a bipartisan consensus between centre-left and centre-right parties (Calossi and Coticchia, 2009;Coticchia and Vignoli, 2018;Vignoli, 2019). However, during the so-called 'Second Republic', centrist parties were invariably in government with extreme (left and right) parties, holding a more sceptical position concerning MOAs.…”

When does politics stop at the water’s edge? A QCA of parliamentary consensus on military deployment decisions

“…A score of 0.33 was assigned to cases where parliamentary consent was sought after troops were deployed or that lacked a legal requirement of parliamentary approval and where governments put their decision to vote without there having been any prior involvement of parliament. This was the case for the deployment votes in Italy and for the votes in the UK's House of Commons on Iraq, Libya, and Syria (Mello, 2017;Coticchia and Vignoli, 2018;Strong, 2018). A score of 0 was assigned to deployment votes in France, where voting on military deployment is only required after 4 months, and to Belgium's parliamentary vote on the French-led operation Serval, which was an ex post legitimatization of a government's decision without parliament having an actual impact on the decision (Ostermann, 2017;Reykers and Fonck, 2018: 690).…”

“…These paths cover six Italian cases of political contestation, which show that it is difficult to find broad consensus in a fractionalized parliament. With the exception of some more controversial operations, such as the 2003 Iraq War, there was a bipartisan consensus between Italy's main centreleft and centre-right parties on military operations (Ignazi et al, 2012;Coticchia and Vignoli, 2018). However, operations that enjoyed such bipartisan support, such as the 1990 Persian Gulf War or the 1992 UN operation in Somalia, were contested by Italy's radical-left parties.…”