Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the ‘most’ reformist one of all? Policy innovation and design coherence of the Renzi government

ABSTRACT

The Renzi government is currently under scrutiny by many scholars of Italian politics. Their main focus is either on the Prime Minister’s leadership and communication skills or on government legislative activity with a particular emphasis on the relationship between the government and parliament. However, these studies still lack an analysis of the Renzi government with regard to the quality of its main policy measures. Has the Renzi government produced innovative and coherent policy reforms? To answer this research question, this article focuses on three policy sectors: education, the labour market, and public administration. We compare the Renzi cabinet with two other Italian governments that are generally considered very effective in decision-making: the first Prodi government (1996–1998) and the second Berlusconi government (2001–2005). Thus, we are able to assess how much policy innovation and policy design coherence characterize 11 major reforms that have been approved by those same 3 governments over time. This in turn allows us to verify whether the rhetoric of the Renzi government as ‘the most innovative government’ of recent decades holds empirically.

KEYWORDS:

• Italian politics
• policy design
• government
• education
• labour market
• administration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. However, as Marangoni (2016a, 6) has correctly claimed, ‘the rate of “prime-ministerialisation” of the executive’s activity reflects the nature of government initiatives themselves, perhaps even more than it reflects the desire and the capacity for coordination with the Prime Minister’s office’.

2. Thus, the Renzi cabinet confirms the chronic difficulty faced by Italian Governments in achieving their goals in Parliament through the ordinary legislative process.

3. Specifically, we are comparing a centre-left government (Prodi I), a centre-right government (Berlusconi II), and a grand-coalition government (Renzi). Moreover, whereas the Prodi cabinet was a minority government, the second Berlusconi cabinet was a minimum winning coalition, and the Renzi cabinet is an oversized coalition.

4. Scholars do not agree on when the Italian ‘Second Republic’ actually started: 1994 or 1996? We decided to consider the 1994–1996 biennium as still a transition period.

5. Specifically, the hand-coding process was developed as follows. First, each policy document was coded separately by both authors on the basis of a shared a priori criterion, namely, the decision to divide the policy measure under scrutiny into all its relevant items. Second, contradictory cases – for example, items included by one author but excluded by another author – were resolved jointly.

6. However, we excluded any expert who directly participated in any of the policy processes here analysed; otherwise, answers would have been unduly biased. In fact, it can be presumed that s/he would have evaluated her/his reforming law as the most innovative and the most coherent of all. Furthermore, we have tried to balance the choice of experts in terms of their political preferences.

7. However, another potential source of bias has to be taken into account. Even though the questionnaire clearly asked for evaluations that disregard the actual implementation of policy formulations, it is not possible to exclude a priori that ‘older’ reforms expiate the fact that their implementation, most of the time, did not follow what was stated ‘on paper’. In other words, experts might have included this aspect in their judgements, thereby misjudging Prodi’s and Berlusconi’s reforms with respect to those of Renzi. Yet, we are quite aware that this tendency, albeit potentially present, does not have a great impact on data reliability.

8. Intended as the causal relationship between policy aims and the adopted policy measures.

9. We are referring to both the ‘Amato Protocol’ of 1992 and the ‘Ciampi Protocol’ of 1993. In both cases, the social partners (i.e. the trade unions and employers) as well as policymakers agreed on the introduction of new employment contracts based on two levels: national-level collective agreements and agreements reached at the company/area level; moreover, those same pacts established a number of crucial guidelines for the comprehensive future reform of the Italian labour market.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giliberto Capano

Giliberto Capano is professor of Public Policy at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy, where he is also the coordinator of the PhD programme in Political Science and Sociology. He is the director of the Italian Centre for Research on Universities and Higher Education Systems (UNIRES) and co-editor of the journal Policy & Society, and Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. His research focuses on governance dynamics, policy change, legislative behaviour, and comparative public policy. He has recently published: (co-editor with M. Howlett and M. Ramesh) Varieties of Governance, Palgrave, 2015; and (co-author with M. Regini and M. Turri), Changing Governance in Universities. Italian Higher Education in Comparative Perspective, Palgrave, 2016.

Andrea Pritoni

Andrea Pritoni is an assistant professor in the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy. His main research interests are Italian politics (governments and parties), interest groups and policy analysis (especially with respect to banking). He has recently published articles in Comparative European Politics (2015), Italian Political Science Review (2015) and Contemporary Italian Politics (2016), as well as a book on the Italian Association of Banks (2015).