A Study on Ideology, Cohesion and the Strategic Use of Executive Action in Italy

Due to the recent global pandemic as well as to the occurrence of globalised crises, governments around the globe are being forced to make ample use of emergency legislation and executive action. These instruments are of crucial importance in order to deliver swift responses against unexpected disasters, as well as to modify the regulatory architecture so that societies are better protected against extreme events. One immediate example of this is the use of executive action and/or emergency powers to allocate resources needed to offer refuge to an unforeseen migratory wave or to establish rules governing access to vaccinations against COVID. However, a growing scholarship focuses on how unilateral action is used strategically by political actors independently from the occurrence of a crisis. This thesis tries to understand the system of incentives and the possible consequences of the political use of emergencies through three separate papers. All of them are directly concerned with actors, ideological stances and procedures within the Parliamentary environment. The first paper finds that governments in Italy make strategic use of executive action in order to overcome the hostility of the legislature. To do so, the paper computes the ideological coordinates of cabinet parties across multiple policy areas. On this occasion, political manifestos give the necessary source of information to identify where parties stand in the left-right spectrum. On the other hand, the second paper looks at the legislator-level determinants of executive action. It studies how cabinets exploit unilateral action as a way to cope with the non-cohesive parties within their own majorities. It also finds that when cabinets expect larger waves of party-switching, they are more likely to use emergency decrees. To conclude, the third chapter introduces a new dataset on decision-making in Italy which gathers information on legislative activity, political actors and their behaviour from 1996 to 2022. Regarding legislative activity, it collects all of the proposals coming to Parliament and the cabinet, following them from presentation to final approval (if applicable). When a passage is determined by electronic vote, such as in most cases, the dataset also contains roll-call preferences of MPs and their parliamentary group. Finally, it collects personal information on all the legislators.