Abstract
Populism is, by definition, against everything that appears to make public decisions less “easy”, thus making the law-making process as one of its natural targets. In fact, the essence of legislative procedure is not to make the decision instant but subject it to a series of intermediate steps. Hence, a populist movement clashes with it once it enters the parliament. However, it is necessary to distinguish between the two scenarios, and Italy has given interesting examples of both: when the populist movement is in the opposition and when it is in majority. In the first case, the opposition (populist) movement tends to exacerbate the use of obstructionism and generally transforms the moment of decision into that of a performance. However, present times (from 2018) are even more interesting from an Italian perspective in order to study the behaviour of populist movements when they are in the government. In fact, emphasis on performance remains, thus turning the legislative activity into an extreme spectacularisation, systematically sacrificing its good functioning.
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All translations are made by the author, unless otherwise noted.
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This is obviously something that did not concern Italy alone. For example, what Jerry L. Mashaw calls “the idealist’s vision”: in this view, administrative processes are a “part of the general fabric of American public and constitutional law. The law of administrative procedure contributes, as does all such law, to the construction of an operationally effective and symbolically appropriate normative regime. To put the matter slightly differently, administrative procedural requirements embedded in law shape administrative decision-making in accordance with our fundamental (but perhaps malleable) images of the legitimacy of state action. That is administrative procedure’s purpose and its explanation” (Mashaw 1990: 268; id. 1985).
Furthermore, it is well known that Niklas Luhmann from a sociological point of view stressed on “legitimization through process” (Luhmann 1983): “the link with democracy is evident, because by acting in a democratic way, the authorities can improve their legitimization. According to [Luhmann’s] opinion, proceedings and participation are also devices that build up confidence and trust in the decisions reached not only for achieving consensus, but also for absorbing the disagreement of the community” (Fracchia 2005: 591).
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The issues related to the “explosion” of a system of administrative independent authorities (Predieri 1997; Merusi 2000; Grasso 2006) remained outside this contribution. It goes without saying that they have been the subject of critical attention in the Italian debate (also, for further references, see Pantalone 2018; Titomanlio 2017) revolving around the legitimacy of their action and the impact of their acts on the system of sources of law (Pantalone, 2018; Giannelli 2018).
Likewise, the matters relating to the due process of law will not be addressed here (see Della Cananea 2016; Morrone 2012: 847 and ff.), as well as—given the focus on the national level—those relating to the search of legality on a global scale (Klabbers and Palombella 2019; Palombella 2012: 67 and ff.).
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Given their importance in the recent Italian experience, the delegated legislation and the decree-law (decreto-legge) will also be dealt with here.
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By referring to one of the most influential analysis of Italian politics at the end of the 1980s (i.e. LaPalombara 1987), Gianfranco Pasquino recently underlined that “[LaPalombara] warned that the proposed reforms would destabilise the political system and negatively affect Italian politics. Though its performance was often unsatisfactory, thanks to its ability to engage in bargaining, logrolling, and muddling through, the Italian political class had achieved significant results”, so that “changing the rules of the game might destabilise Italian politics in many unexpected and unpredictable ways” (Pasquino 2019: 199).
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Provocatively, one might recall that fascism began its authoritarian path precisely by exploiting the potentially authoritarian degenerations already present in previous years (Cassese 2016).
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Unlike other countries with consensual political orders such as Belgium and Holland, Italy has always proved to have an underdeveloped system of coalition governance wherein “coalition agreements focused almost exclusively on the distribution of governmental posts, and as a result the debate over public policies, both between parliamentary groupings and within the cabinet itself, only took place once the government had been formed, and it was an ongoing process”, so that coalitions “were often undermined by the prospect that one single party or party faction could in practice veto or oppose the government’s position on any given question” (Vassallo 2007: 694–695).
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See also the problematic practice of inserting heterogeneous provisions when the decree is converted into law, as in the case of Legislative Decree no. 135/2018, which grew from 39 to 152 articles (Matarazzi 2019: 182 and ff.)
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As it was well summarized a few years ago, legislative decrees are “promulgated by government on the basis of prior authorisation from parliament, and they immediately come into force as laws, without any need for further parliamentary ratification. Pursuant to article 76 of the Constitution, in order to delegate to government the power to promulgate legislative decrees, parliament has to pass a law establishing the subject matter and the ‘directive principles and criteria’ of the act of delegation, as well as the time period available to the government in which to promulgate the decrees” (Vassallo 2007: 698).
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At least since the mid-1990s, “each parliamentary term is structured around large delegated procedures. When it is difficult to approve broad delegation laws, even the legislature is struggling to continue. The choices may be different […], but the design of reforms through the construction of delegated laws appears to be an essential prerequisite for the tenure of a parliamentary term” (Di Porto and Piana 2019a: 9).
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Although it cannot be dealt with here, the way in which the European Union legislation is transposed to Italy via delegated legislation is a topic of great interest; see recently Moavero Milanesi and Piccirilli (2018).
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As translated on the website of the Court, www.cortecostituzionale.it. On the “‘flexibilization’ of the constitutional distribution of lawmaking powers and the limited role of constitutional adjudication” in relation to it, see Barsotti et al. (2016: 116 and ff).
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Pacini, F. (2020). Populism and Law-Making Process. In: Delledonne, G., Martinico, G., Monti, M., Pacini, F. (eds) Italian Populism and Constitutional Law. Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37401-3_6
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