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ABSTRACT
The Italian Law-Making Archive, denoted ILMA, is a new Web application for supporting the analysis of the Italian legislative processes. It aims to overcome the shortcomings that commonly affect quantitative analyses of legislative systems, providing ready-to-use data on the Italian context organized in a relational structure and included in a unique repository. After comparing ILMA with other Web information systems, this article describes the database architecture, proposes several examples of potential customized analyses that scholars may conduct through ILMA, and explains its main functionalities for querying the database and exporting data.
Notes
1. ILMA is a product of the Centre for the Observation of Legislatures (COoL, http://www.coolresearch.net) and can be accessed through the following URL http://www.socpol.unimi.it/ilma.
8. In Italy the term “reading” refers to the whole passage of a bill in a chamber in a navette system and not to a specific stage of the legislative process as in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, at the moment only roll calls in the Chamber of Deputies are available.
9. A fact table is a focus of interest in a decision-making process and describes different measures that can be analyzed according to some dimensions of analysis. Dimensions are discrete attributes that determine the minimum granularity adopted to represent facts. Several properties can be extracted from the ILMA database for each dimension and exploited for data selection. A hierarchy can be specified for each dimension representing many-to-one relationships that can be exploited for aggregations (Golfarelli & Rizzi, Citation2009).
10. The legislative delegation procedure is regulated by Article 76 of the Italian Constitution and by Law 400/98. The government is authorized to issue a legislative decree only if there is a law (delegating law) approved by the Parliament that contains one or more specific delegations which specify the scope of the government’s legislative activity and the deadline for fulfilling this scope.
11. We have not developed such algorithms directly in PHP for performance reasons. Moreover, these algorithms are directly available in the R package and their implementation is optimized.
12. The ILMA system predisposes a filtering selection on the policy area only at the macro-level because a filter at the micro-level may excessively decrease the number of bills with the risk to invalidate the analysis results. W-NOMINATE has been preferred to other estimation techniques, such as Ideal and Optimal Classification, because it has a better computational performance.
13. The median legislator’s position is particularly important for this kind of analysis because it is considered a robust estimation of the preferences expressed by a collective body, such as a party or a parliament. As demonstrated by the “Median Voter Theorem” (Downs, Citation1957), in a one-dimensional space in which the actors have single-peaked preference orderings, the ideal point of the median cannot be defeated by any other position in a pairwise competition adopting simple majority rule.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marco Mesiti
Marco Mesiti is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Milano (Italy). His research activity has been carried out in the database area and has focused on Web data management, with specific interests in access control models, approximate retrieval, heterogeneous data sources integration, and evolution.
Alessandro Pellegata
Alessandro Pellegata is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milano (Italy) and a member of the Centre for the Observation of Legislatures (COoL). His main research interests are comparative institutional analysis, legislative studies, and political corruption.
Paolo Perlasca
Paolo Perlasca is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Milano (Italy). His research activity has been carried out in the database area and has focused on Web data management, with specific interests in access control models, digital rights management, and development of Web applications.