Parliament of Italy
Infobox Legislature
name = Parlamento Italiano
coa_pic = Italy-Emblem.svg
coa-pic =
session_room =
house_type = Bicameral
houses = Senate of the Republic Chamber of Deputies
leader1_type = President of the Senate
leader1 =
party1 = Popolo della Libertà
election1 =
leader2_type = President of the Chamber
leader2 =
party2 = Popolo della Libertà
election2 =
members = 945
and 7 Senators for life
p_groups =
Popolo della libertà
UDC
Italia dei Valori
Gruppo Misto
election3 =
meeting_place = Chamber of Deputies—
Senate of the Republic—
website = The Parliament of Italy ( _it. Parlamento Italiano) is the national parliament of
Since 2005, a Proportional System electoral law is being used in both houses. A "majority prize" is given to the coalition obtaining a
Function of the Parliament
The Parliament is the representative body of the citizens in the republican Institutions, and act accordingly.
By the Republican Constitution of 1948, the two Houses of the Italian Parliament possess the same rights and powers: this particular form of parliamentary democracy (the so-called "perfect bicameralism") has been coded in the current form after the dismissal of the fascist dictatorship of the 1920s and 1930s and after
The two Houses are independent from each other and never meet jointly except under circumstances specified by the Constitution.The House of Deputies has 630 members, while the Senate has 315 elected members and a small number of life senators: former Presidents of the Republic and up to five members appointed by the President for having contributed to the Country high achievement in the social or scientific field. As of
The main prerogative of the Parliament is the exercise of
The Parliament votes support to the
The Parliament in joint session of both Houses elects the President of the Republic, five (one third) members of the "Corte Costituzionale" and one third of the "Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura".It can vote to decide an accusation of "high treason or attack to the Constitution" against the President of the Republic (though this situation has never occurred).
Electoral System
The present electoral system, approved on
The proportional system is district-based, rather than nationwide as in some smaller countries. Italy is divided into a certain number of districts for the Chamber of Deputies, and a certain number of districts for the Senate. Each district is assigned a number of seats proportionate to its total of the population of Italy. Within each district, voters choose between lists of candidates which parties or coalitions have registered in advance, and each list is awarded seats based on its percentage of the vote in the district. Candidates on the lists are ranked in order of priority, so if a party wins for example ten seats, the first ten candidates on its list receive seats in parliament.
The law officially recognizes coalitions of parties: to be part of a coalition, a party must sign its official program and indicate its support for the coalition's candidate to the prime-ministership.
Chamber of Deputies
For the Chamber of Deputies, Italy is divided into 26 constituencies:
Seats are allocated to parties proportionate to votes received in each constituency, among the parties that pass thresholds of the total vote on a "national basis":
* Minimum 10% for a coalition. If this requirement is not met, the 4% limit for single parties apply.
* Minimum 4% for any party not in a coalition.
* Minimum 2% for any party in a coalition, except that the first party below 2% in a coalition does receive seats.
Also, parties representing regional linguistic minorities obtain seats if they receive at least 20% of the ballots in their constituency.
In order to guarantee a working majority, a coalition or party which obtains a
enate of the Republic
For the Senate, the constituencies correspond to the 20
* Minimum 20% for a coalition.
* Minimum 8% for any party not in a coalition.
* Minimum 3% for any party in a coalition (there is no exception for the first party in a coalition below this threshold, unlike the lower house).
The coalition that wins a plurality in a region is automatically given 55% of the region's seats, if it has not reached that percentage already. As this mechanism is region-based, however, and opposing parties or coalitions may benefit from it in different regions, it guarantees no clear majority for any block in the Senate, unlike the national super-assignment system in the Chamber of Deputies.
Criticism
The new electoral law has come under wide criticism from the centre-left opposition since its introduction for a series of reasons:;Instability:The system is considered to be less stable than the previous
The previous electoral system (August 1993-2005)
Between 1991 and 1993, resulting from two referendums and legislation, Italian electoral law was altered substantially. Electoral law in Italy is determined by Parliament, not the constitution. This, taken with the concurrent collapse of the Italian party system, marks the transition between the First and Second Italian Republics.
Two referenda
The nearly pure
A reform movement known as "COREL" (Committee to Promote Referendums on Elections), led by maverick DC-member
Emboldened by their victory in 1991, and encouraged by the unfolding
As it was under no constitutional obligation to enact a purely majoritarian system (nor were they under obligation to promulgate a new electoral law for the Chamber of Deputies), and cognizant of its declining popular support, the sitting parliament enacted a new electoral law in August, 1993 that provided for single-member districts while reflecting their own interests. Despite this, many of them would be voted out of office in the national election in March, 1994.
The electoral law
The national elections used an
The Senate includes 315 elected members, of whom:
* 232 are directly elected in single-member districts.
* 83 are elected by regional proportional representation
* six represent Italians residing overseas
* a small, variable number of senators-for-life include former presidents of the Republic and several other persons appointed for life by a president of the Republic (no more than 5), according to special constitutional provisions (scientists, writers, artists, social workers, politicians, tycoons).
The Senate was elected on a single ballot. All those votes not contributing to a winning candidate were thrown into a regional pool (of which there were 40), and within that district were then used to allocate the seats proportionally. There was no
The
* 475 are directly elected in single member districts.
* 155 are elected by regional proportional representation
* 12 will represent Italians residing overseas at the next elections (2006).
The Chamber of Deputies used two ballots. The first ballot elected that district's member, on a purely plurality basis. The second ballot, in which only parties and party-lists were listed, was used to determine the proportional seats, allocated within one single national constituency, with a 4% minimum threshold for party representation.
A complicated mechanism known as "scorporo", a previously unknown word in Italian politics, was used to tabulate PR votes. The number of votes cast for candidates coming in second place on the "first ballot (SMD)" would be subtracted from the (obviously much larger) number of votes earned on the "second ballot (PR)" by the party of the winning candidate in the first ballot. This would be repeated for each single-member district. This was developed -- against the overwhelming opinion expressed in the referendums -- to dampen the effect of the first-past-the-post system, which it was feared might promote the prevalence of one political party, especially parties that were strong in one geographical area.
The law also introduced a
In practice, the system has proven egregiously useless, even for its own corrupt purposes. First-past-the-post candidates usually declare their formal allegiance to some decoy list that will collect no votes, known as "liste civetta", thereby relieving their own party of a reduction in votes in the proportional quota. The bypass worked so well that in the elections of 2001
Nor has the system accomplished the goals desired by the voters. The first parliament elected after the electoral reform produced Silvio Berlusconi's first government, which lasted eight months. Small parties still enter parliament and form unstable coalitions. On the other hand, political parties in Italy seem to be coalescing around two poles, if imperfectly so, and governments have lasted much longer, at least by Italian standards. On that level, the electoral reform can be seen as an improvement over the electoral law prior to it, even if Italy has now returned to a PR system.
The 1947-1993 electoral system
Between 1947 and 1993, Italy used an electoral system that was a nearly pure proportional representation system, which was subject to two insignificant thresholds:
1) that a party needed to achieve 300,000 votes at the national level;
2) Italy was divided into 27 electoral regions ("circoscrizione"), of unequal size, which were awarded a certain number of seats in Parliament based on population (e.g., Rome received more than 50). Within these regions, seats were divided proportionally; in order to become a member of parliament, a party member needed to be directly elected within one of these regions - approximately 60,000 votes. This system allocated 90% of the seats in both houses of parliament. The votes that did not go to a winning candidate were then thrown into one national electoral district, which was then divided proportionally and used to determine the remaining 10%, thereby going to candidates not directly elected.
Furthermore, voters were able to list their preferences for candidates on a party list, in order to prevent the parties from exploiting the power they acquired from being able to write their party lists. In practice, however, parties were able to manipulate these numbers to that preferred members, i.e., members loyal to one faction within a party, could enter parliament.
As neither of these thresholds was difficult to achieve, this system naturally benefitted the small parties. This was exacerbated by the fact that the Lower House has 630 seats. Because of the design of the electoral law did not provide for any mechanism to exclude small parties (indeed it seemed designed to encourage them) or provide any incentives to avoid splintering, by the 1970s the Italian party system had become completely fragmented, with 17 parties represented in parliament in contrast to the eight represented in 1947. This resulted in highly unstable coalition governments (the average length was nine months) and political turbulence. And because voters had little control over which candidates entered parliament, political parties were insulated from the wishes civil society. Relations between political elites and the masses therefore became clientelistic; voter behavior and politics in general became a contest as to which party could secure more pork-barrel investment for a specific region. It also allowed politicians to become corrupt.
Overseas constituency
The Italian Parliament is one of the few legislatures in the world to reserve seats for citizens residing abroad. There are twelve such seats in the Chamber of Deputies and six in the Senate.
The Overseas Constituency consists of four electoral zones, each of which elect at least one Deputy and one Senator:
*
*
* North and
*
The remaining seats are distributed between the same overseas electoral zones in proportion to the number of Italian citizens resident in each.
Italian citizens living outside of Italy have always had the "right" to vote in all referendums and elections being held in Italy (provided they had registered their residence abroad with their relevant consulate). However until late 2001, any citizens wishing to vote, were required "physically" to return to the city or town in Italy where he or she was registered on the
Until 2001 the Italian state offered citizens living abroad a free return train journey to their home town in Italy in order to vote, however the only portion of the train journey that was free of charge was "on Italian soil". Any costs incurred in getting from their place of residence abroad to the Italian border had to be covered by the citizen wanting to vote, therefore a free return train journey was hardly an
After numerous years of petitioning and fierce debate, the Italian government, in late 2001, finally passed a law allowing Italian citizens living abroad to vote in elections in Italy by
References
*cite book|last=Gilbert|first=Mark |year=1995|title=The Italian Revolution: The End of Politics, Italian Style?
*cite book|last=Koff|first=Sondra|coauthors=Stephen P. Koff |year=2000|title=Italy: From the First to the Second Republic
*cite book|first=Gianfranco |last=Pasquino|authorlink=Gianfranco Pasquino|year=1995|chapter=Die Reform eines Wahlrechtssystems: Der Fall Italien|title=Politische Institutionen im Wandel
ee also
*
*
*
External links
* [http://www.parlamento.it/ Official website] (in Italian)
* [http://electionresources.org/it/ Election resources for the Parliament]