Second Chamber Reform in Italy: Federalism Left Behind

Baldi, Brunetta

doi:10.1080/13608746.2018.1518067

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

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“…While initiatives to reform the Senate's powers date back to the 1980s (Vercesi 2017: 606), the last attempt was made in 2016, shortly after bicameral congruence had reached a low point (Figure 7.3). A constitutional reform proposal was accepted by both chambers but ultimately rejected in a referendum (Baldi 2018). The reasons for this rejection are numerous (Bergman 2019;Ceccarini and Bordignon 2017;Di Mauro and Memoli 2018).…”

Section: Italymentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism

Ganghof¹

2021

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In a democracy, a constitutional separation of powers between the executive and the assembly may be desirable, but the constitutional concentration of executive power in a single human being is not. The book defends this thesis and explores ‘semi-parliamentary government’ as an alternative to presidential government. Semi-parliamentarism avoids power concentration in one person by shifting the separation of powers into the democratic assembly. The executive becomes fused with only one part of the assembly, even though the other part has at least equal democratic legitimacy and robust veto power on ordinary legislation. The book identifies the Australian Commonwealth and Japan, as well as the Australian states of New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia, as semi-parliamentary systems. Using data from 23 countries and 6 Australian states, it maps how parliamentary and semi-parliamentary systems balance competing visions of democracy; it analyzes patterns of electoral and party systems, cabinet formation, legislative coalition-building, and constitutional reforms; it systematically compares the semi-parliamentary and presidential separation of powers; and it develops new and innovative semi-parliamentary designs, some of which do not require two separate chambers.

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