Parliament of Italy

The Parliament of Italy (Italian: Parlamento Italiano) is the national parliament of Italy. It is a bicameral legislature with 945 elected members (parlamentari). The Chamber of Deputies, with 630 members (deputati) is the lower house. The Senate is the upper house and has 315 members (senatori).

Since 2005, a Proportional System electoral law is being used in both houses. A majority prize is given to the coalition obtaining a plurality: at national level for the House of Deputies, at regional level for the Senate.

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 World War II.
The two Houses are independent from each other and never meet together except in the cases specified by the Constitution. The House of Deputies has 630 members (the highest number among elected parliamentary Houses in the world, with the exception of China), 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 15 May 2006 there are 7 life senators (of which 3 former presidents).

The main prerogative of the Parliament is the hold of the legislative power, that is the power to enact laws. For a text to become law, it must receive the vote of both Houses independently in the same form. A text is discussed in one of the Houses, amended, and approved or rejected: if approved, it is passed to the other House, which can amend it and approve or reject it. If approved without amendments, the text is promulgated by the President of the Republic and becomes law. If approved with amendments, it is passed back to the first House, which can approve it, in which case the law is promulgated, or reject it.

The Parliament votes for the support to the Government, which is appointed by the President of the Republic and usually led by the leader of the coalition winning the elections. The Government must receive a support vote by both Houses before being officially on power, and the Parliament can request a new vote at any moment if a quota of any House so request. Should a Government fail to obtain a vote, it must dimissionate, and either a new Government is formed or the President of the Republic can dissolve the Houses and new elections are held.

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 with regards to the President of the Republic (it has however never been the case of such a vote).

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:

The remaining seats are distributed between the same overseas electoral zones in proportion to the number of Italian citizens resident in each.

Electoral system

The electoral system was changed in the run-up to the 2006 General Election from an Additional Member electoral system to a proportional one. The opposition coalition at the time, L'Unione, pledged to reinstate the previous system if they won the election. In the event, L'Unione did win the election by a very narrow margin.

New Electoral System

The new electoral system, approved on December 14 2005, is based on proportional representation with a series of thresholds to encourage parties to form coalitions.

Both for the lower and higher house of the Parliament, Italy is divided in a certain number of constituencies, in which seats will be distributed according to the share of votes received by a party. Available seats are assigned to these constituencies proportionally to their population. In all cases, the lists of party candidates is given beforehand, and citizens cannot state a preference for any given candidate: if a list wins 10 seats, its first ten candidates will be elected.

The law officially recognizes coalitions of parties: to be part of a coalition, a party must sign its official program and indicate a candidate to prime-ministership.

Chamber of deputies

Italy is divided in 26 constituencies: Lombardy has three constituencies, whereas Piedmont, Veneto, Latium, Campania, and Sicily have two and all other regions one. These constituencies elect 617 MPs. Another one is elected in Aosta Valley and 12 are reserved to the constituency of Italians living abroad.

To obtain seats, some thresholds must be surpassed on 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. However, the first party in a coalition that rates below 2% is also assigned seats.

Also, parties representing regional linguistic minorities obtain seats if they receive at least 20% ballots in their constituency. The coalition or party that obtains a plurality, but is assigned less than 340 seats, is assigned additional seats to reach this number, corresponding roughly to a 54% majority. Seats are allocated proportionally to received votes in each constituency, among the parties that passed the thresholds on a national basis.

Senate of the Republic

For the Senate, the constituencies correspond to the 20 regions of Italy, with 6 senators allocated for Italians living abroad. The electoral system is very similar to the one for the lower house, but is in many ways transferred to regional basis. The thresholds are also different, and applied on regional basis:

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, as in 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. It is possible for a coalition to win in a region and lose in another: there is ostensibly no mechanism to guarantee a nation-wide majority in the Senate.

Criticism

The new electoral law came under wide criticism from the centre-left opposition for a series of reasons:

Instability:The system was considered to be less stable than the previous additional member system, and to give more room for political intrigue. The region-based system in the higher house is not guaranteed to produce a clear majority, and may pave the way for crises.
Large Party Bias:It was alleged that the system is thoroughly studied to advantage prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's House of Freedoms: in particular, there are many small parties below or around the 2% threshold in the opposition coalition L'Unione (such as the Italian Democratic Socialists, the Federation of the Greens, Italy of Values, Popular Alliance-UDEUR, the Party of Italian Communists, and the European Republican Movement), whereas there are much fewer in Berlusconi's alliance. However, these parties did form electoral alliances to avoid losing votes. One such alliance is the Rose in the Fist.
"Partitocracy":It has been alleged that Italian parties have retained too much power in the First Republic, screening the choices citizens had in elections; this electoral law would reinstate fixed electoral lists, where voters can only express a preference for a list but not for a specific candidate. This can be used by parties to all but guarantee re-election to unpopular but powerful figures, who would be weaker in a first past the post electoral system.
Adaptation to gallups:In Italian elections the left-wing tends to fare better in direct confrontation than in proportional voting, a sign there are voters who trust left-wing candidates but right-wing political parties, for reasons that can be debated. It is alleged that the centre-right majority in the Parliament undertook this reform to boost their chances in the upcoming elections of 2006 (they indeed lost by a very small margin).
No agreement with the opposition:The law was passed by the majority against the opinion of the opposition. Whereas all recognize their full right to do so, many feel that the "rules of the game" should be agreed upon by everybody, and not imposed by one side.

See also this series of articles by La Repubblica and this description by the Forza Italia Web site.

Previous Electoral System

The national elections have Additional Member System which is a mixed system of 75% of seats allocated using a First Past the Post electoral system and 25% using a proportional method.

Voters can cast two independent votes for the lower chamber, while the proportional 25% of the Senate is collected from the best losers.

The lower chamber has a 4% admittance threshold, while the upper has none; furthermore, an overly complicated mechanism (known as scorporo, a previously unknown word in Italian) to dampen the effect of the first-past-the-post system was implemented out of fear that the new system might promote a prevalence of one political party over another. In practice, the system has proven egregiously useless, as first-past-the-post candidates usually declare their formal allegiance to some decoy list that will collect no votes, known as liste civetta, and relieves their own party of a reduction in votes in the proportional quota. The bypass worked so well that in the elections of 2001 Forza Italia had not enough candidates to fill all the seats it was assigned.

This dissonance in electoral systems is the result of a series of referendums that changed Italy's electoral system from proportional to first-past-the-post; since only abrogative referedums are allowed, a complicated selective deletion of the previous law was devised by promoters, and most of its results have been left untouched. The proportional quota was one of the few modifications added after the referendums, that had produced a 100% first-past-the-post system.

National elections are held every five years, but the president of the Republic can call for earlier elections. In fact, no parliament in republican Italy has ever formally lasted its full five years, even if by a few days.

The Italian Chamber of Deputies has 630 members, of whom

475 are directly elected
155 are elected by regional proportional representation
12 will represent Italians residing overseas at the next elections (2006).

The Senate includes 315 elected members, of whom:

232 are directly elected
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 for each president), according to special constitutional provisions (scientists, writers, artists, social workers, politicians, tycoons).

External links

Official website (in Italian)
Election resources for the Parliament

Government of Italy | National legislatures | Parliaments by country | National legislatures

Parlamento Italiano | Parlement van Italië | Italias parlament

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