The Grande Riforma of the Italian constitution: majoritarian versus participatory democracy?

ABSTRACT

The economic crisis has triggered various constitutional reform processes in Europe, indicating a trend towards innovative forms of civic participation. In Italy, major constitutional reform attempts have been made since 2013. The article critically discusses the Italian case from the perspective of the meaningful participation of civil society and the citizenry in constitutional reform. First, it discusses civic participation in constitutional politics in theoretical terms, and places Italian constitutional reform in a comparative, European perspective. Second, the current reform is placed in the historical context of an Italian ‘season of constitutional reform’. Third, the recent constitutional reform attempts are examined closely, with an emphasis on the main ‘constitutional entrepreneurs’, the reform process, and types of civic engagement with the reform. Fourth, ‘constitutional resistance’ to the Grande Riforma is discussed. The article concludes that the recent, unsuccessful, reform attempt neatly fits a repertoire of constitutional instrumentalism and majoritarianism that has emerged in the last 25 years, driven by mainstream parties, and displaying relatively little attention to civic participation in reform, while facing robust resistance from civil society and opposition parties.

KEYWORDS:

• Constitutional reform
• constitutional resistance
• Italian politics
• majoritarian democracy
• popular participation

Acknowledgment

The author acknowledges a Unità di Ricerca 2011 grant of the Provincia Autonoma di Trento, Italy. The author wishes to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their extensive and most useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Official documents

Parlamento Italiano, Disegno di legge C. 3124, 17ª Legislatura.

Camera dei Deputati, Seduta n. 350, resoconto stenografico, 16 December 2014, 80

Legge Costituzionale 6 agosto 1993, n. 1 (1). Funzioni della Commissione parlamentare per le riforme istituzionali e disciplina del procedimento di revisione costituzionale, Gazzeta Ufficiale 10 August 1993, n. 186.

Notes

1. In many of the constitutional reform processes, centre-left parties have initiated or supported the involvement of citizens (e.g. in Iceland, Ireland, and Romania).

2. The approach in the article will start from democratic theory, identifying a number of democratic models that can be related to distinctive constitutional reform procedures and mechanisms. In the subsequent discussion of the Italian season of constitutional reform, the key analytical approach is grounded in the sociology of constitutional politics, which focusses on the interplay of different ‘constitutional subjects’ (in particular political parties, the president, but also civil society forces).

3. Significant examples of citizen involvement in constitutional reform indicate combinations of different types of democratic reform and civic engagement. My interest here is in the design of reform processes, and less in whether they are fully comparable with the Italian case (cf. Renwick 2014). In Iceland (2010–12), both civil society associations and the Socialist Party pushed for comprehensive, citizen-driven constitutional reform. Two, one-day deliberative fora were set up, in which circa 1,000 citizens participated, while a Constitutional Council, consisting of 25 independent citizens elected at the end of 2010, was responsible for producing a draft constitutional revision in four months (April – July 2011). The draft produced, consisting of a wholly new constitution, emphasised amongst other things a range of important participatory institutions, while the drafting itself has often been hailed as highly innovative in its use of social media in soliciting comments and suggestions from citizens. In the autumn of 2012, a referendum with six questions was put to the population. In the case of Ireland, on one hand, two major political parties – Fine Gael and the Labour Party – endorsed inclusive constitutional reform, and on the other, academics as well as civil associations pushed for participatory and deliberative reform, in particular through the organisation, We the Citizens. At the end of 2011, a one-year Constitutional Convention was started in which 66 citizens (selected by lot) deliberated together with 33 politicians over constitutional reforms. One of the results of this process was the (successful) May 2015 referendum on same sex marriage. In Romania, a Forum Constituţional was set up (March – July 2013), to enable collaboration between the civic organisation, Asociaţia Pro Democraţia (APD), and the Romanian Parliament (a similar endeavour took place in 2002). The Forum consisted of deliberative meetings, including citizens, scholars, and politicians, organised in major Romanian cities, as well as the gathering of citizens’ comments on an online platform.

4. Two referenda were organised, in 1991 and 1993, by a variegated opposition (including Catholic forces, left-wing alternative forces, and radicals such as the Partito Radicale) against the incumbent political parties, with the objective of amending the existing proportional electoral law, believed to be one of the main supports for the ‘partitocrazia’ (the unwarranted predominance of parties in the democratic process) (Augusto and Morrone 2003, 117).

5. Plebiscitarian in the sense that the referendum risks becoming a plebiscite on the functioning of the majority government, its policies and its members, rather than on the contents of the reform (Busia 2003, 65).

6. Napolitano was re-elected President of the Republic in April 2013, a unique event in Italian democratic history. Notably, he made his acceptance of re-election conditional on the finalisation of institutional reforms.

7. According to some constitutionalists, Napolitano’s appointment of an expert group to produce ‘programmatic proposals’ was an ‘invention’ of doubtful constitutional propriety: see Panizza (2015, 18–9). The group ‘tacitly represented the major parliamentary forces, except for the Five-star Movement’ (Fusaro 2015, 435, fn13).

8. The expert commission produced a final report in September 2013. Three different orientations emerged in the commission’s deliberations. Only two were reproduced in the final report (Ragazzoni and Urbinati 2016, 166). The latter reproduced reform ideas very similar to those of preceding commissions, in particular regarding reinforcement of both the Prime Minister and the executive (Ragazzoni and Urbinati 2016, 166–9).

9. I thank Nadia Urbinati for having drawn my attention to and having provided a copy of this letter, dated 7 July 2013.

10. Available at: http://www.libertaegiustizia.it/2013/07/04/riforme-costituzionali-appello-ai-saggi-di-liberta-e-giustizia-e-comitati-dossetti-vogliamo-sapere/ (accessed on 10 July 2016).

11. The public consultation procedure has been criticised for being manipulative and excluding options and issues that would compromise the reform programme of the coalition government. One observer argued that ‘the questionnaires, far from being an instrument of popular participation, have a singularly plebiscitarian [purpose] in that, relying on fraudulent claims, they seek to condition and channel respondents in a distinct direction’ (Volpi, 2013).

12. A further, highly significant part of the reforms, even if formally not part of the Constitution, was electoral reform. In 2014, the Constitutional Court had struck down two parts of the (then) existing electoral law (referred to as the Porcellum): closed-list voting and the majority premium. The new law adopted in May 2015, the Italicum, did not, however, fully eliminate doubts concerning constitutionality, as raised by the Court.

13. For extensive discussions of the substance of the reform, see, e.g., Ceccanti (2016); Fusaro (2015; 2016); Pasquino (2015); Ragazzoni and Urbinati (2016).

14. While resistance to the Renzi reform was extensive, it should be acknowledged that important scholars, such as Carlo Fusaro, Stefano Ceccanti, and Roberto Bin campaigned in favour (see Bin 2016; Ceccanti 2016; Fusaro 2016). The same can be said of important societal actors, such as the main Italian business association, Confindustria.

15. The reform process saw a continuous polemic between PM Renzi and reform minister Boschi, on the one hand, and part of the scholarly community of constitutional experts (pejoratively referred to as ‘professoroni’), on the other (Plutino 2015, 149–50). One of the constitutionalists, Gaetano Azzariti, spoke in an interview of a ‘strategy of delegitimisation of all critical reflection’ (cf. Plutino 2015, 150). The trade unions (e.g. CGIL), also criticised the reforms and the lack of opportunities for societal participation in their drafting.

16. These two forms are derived from an extensive study of constitutional resistance, on the basis of the analysis of documents, (media) statements and interviews the author held with the main representatives, as part of a comparative research project. The argument is not that these are the only or even always the most important dimensions of resistance, but rather that they are an intrinsic and continuous part of constitutional resistance over time.

17. The campaigners for a ‘No’ vote found a significant ally in the newspaper, Il Fatto Quotidiano, which from the summer of 2013 campaigned against the reforms.

18. LeG, March 2014,’ Verso la svolta autoritaria’, available at: http://www.libertaegiustizia.it/2014/03/27 /verso-la-svolta-autoritaria/ (accessed on 11 July, 2016).

19. See http://www.libertaegiustizia.it/2017/01/05/lettera-ai-soci-2/.

20. Some observers judge this to be contradictory (Floridia and Vignati 2014).

21. Cf. Floridia and Vignati (2014, 63). Such affinity between the two entities did not, however, lead the M5S to lend its support to the national public demonstrations organised by LeG and various other organisations, such as the one in Rome on 12 October 2013 (Caruso 2015, 323–4).

22. This became very ‘visible’ in September 2013, when twelve M5S MPs occupied the roof of the Italian parliament, in order to defend the Constitution.

23. Toninelli, Chamber of Deputies, 16-12-2014: 72. The M5S, in the role of opposition party, has on various occasions presented draft bills regarding citizen participation and forms of direct democracy. One major instance is a disegno di legge presented to the Senate’s Commission on Constitutional Affairs on 18 May 2015 (ddl n. 3124).

Additional information

Funding

Unità di Ricerca 2011 grant of the Provincia Autonoma di Trento, Italy

Notes on contributors

Paul Blokker

Paul Blokker is Associate Professor and Jean Monnet Chair at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University, Prague. His publications include New Democracies in Crisis? A Comparative Constitutional Study of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, Routledge (2013); ‘EU Democratic Oversight and Domestic Deviation from the Rule of Law: Sociological Reflections’, in: C. Closa and D. Kochenov (eds), Reinforcing the Rule of Law Oversight in the European Union, CUP (2016); and, co-edited with Chris Thornhill, Sociological Constitutionalism, CUP (forthcoming, 2017)