Patterns of Consensual Law-making in the Italian Parliament

The transformation of the Italian political system, which began in the early 1990s, should have had an impact upon internal parliamentary dynamics, and in particular upon the degree of consensualism within the legislative process. In this paper we are going to examine this hypothesis in the light of the new empirical evidence we have regarding the analysis of Italy’s legislative process, and we shall provide a series of explanations for the unexpected degree of persistence of those legislative patterns characteristic of the so-called ‘first republic’.