SISP Conference 2023

Contemporary representative democracies are often conceptualised as chains of delegation relationships that connect citizens to the political system. Along the chain, citizens delegate decision-making powers to elected representatives sitting in legislative assemblies and to the members of the executive. Political office-holders are in turn made accountable to citizens through a variety of instruments among which political parties are prominent, especially in parliamentary systems. This conceptual framework places primary emphasis on classical themes such as the quality of electoral representation, the degree of policy congruence between citizens and political elites, the functioning of political institutions and the nature of executive-legislative relations. Along with these topics, there is a growing scholarly literature focusing on non-electoral forms of representation. This section is devoted to the analysis of both classical and emerging topics related to parliaments, governments and representation, at sub-national, national and supranational level. We welcome panels examining the relationship between citizens and members of parliament (MPs), the political careers of representatives, the behaviour of parliamentarians, the internal organization of parliaments, issue-politics in parliament, the legislative process, executive-legislative relations, executive politics and non-electoral forms of representation. Panels on the consequences of the various crises – economic, migration, health, military crises – that have impacted on democracies in recent years are also welcome. This section is open to panels that focus on the Italian political system as well as to those that adopt a comparative approach.
Panels may focus on – but are not limited to – the following topics.

Citizens and MPs
Political representation is a particularly complex and multifaceted concept, as politicians can connect to citizens in many ways. Elected MPs represent their voters not only through constituency work and the provision of resources for the district, but also by behaving in a responsive manner to voters’ opinions. For this reason, the study of the attitudinal correspondence between citizens and politicians still constitutes a major topics for scholars interested in representation. Analysing policy congruence between voters and representatives is an especially promising line of research in light of the crises that have recently hit European democracies.

Political careers
Italian political scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to the study of political careers. Much has changed since the days when Giovanni Sartori analysed the biographical characteristics of the Italian parliamentarians. The availability of new online data on parliamentarians and holders of executive posts in local, regional, national and supranational institutions opens new opportunities to study career trajectories within and across different institutional settings.

Legislative behaviour
The topic of legislative behaviour is a classical one, and has often been connected to the study of intra-party politics and electoral incentives. Two innovations are revitalising these studies: on the one hand, the availability of new data on legislative and non-legislative activities and methodological advances have opened virtually unlimited possibilities for eager analysts; on the other hand, a new lively debate on the factors influencing legislative behaviour has recently developed. The old divide between those looking at social norms and values and those considering politicians as purely rational actors has given way to a more constructive effort to understand how the logic of appropriateness and the logic of consequentiality may interact.

Internal organisation of parliaments
The study of the internal organisation of the parliament has a long tradition in Italy, especially with regard to the peculiarities of Italian bicameralism and the role of legislative committees. However, a lot of work is still to be done in this subfield. As parliaments are institutional bodies that evolve over time, existing systematic comparisons across political systems need to be updated. Moreover, the Italian case offers a number of extremely interesting topics to be addressed: among others, the revisions of the standing orders, the evolution of the (once so powerful) legislative committees, and the impact of the recent reduction in the number of MPs on the functioning of the two chambers.

Issue-politics in parliament
According to the issue-competition literature, political parties compete by mainly emphasising issues on which they enjoy an advantage over their political opponents. While issue competition was originally studied by analysing party manifestos, recent works have also started shedding light on how and why parties distribute issue attention in the period between elections and, more specifically, while fulfilling their representative role in parliament. Studying the content of parliamentary questions, bills, laws, decrees and speeches has become one of the most promising ways to investigate issue competition beyond the electoral context.

Legislative process
As highlighted by an extensive and ever-growing research programme on policymaking in multi-party systems, the legislative process mainly serves as a venue where the members of governing coalitions manage their day-to-day relationships and reach policy compromises. The availability of a huge volume of online data on legislative processes and outputs now allows scholars to investigate several topics in this subfield by adopting a large-N design. Some examples are analyses of the patterns of cooperation, competition and conflict among actors (belonging to the government and/or the opposition), works on the consequences of fragmentation in parliament, the study of how different preferences in the two chambers shape legislative outcomes, and analyses of legislative production in times of crisis.

Executive-legislative relations
Since the beginning of the 21th century European politics has been shaken by several crises such as the Great Recession, the migration crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine-Russia war. While the first two have changed the content of political competition and increased polarisation, the third one is believed to have fundamentally altered the equilibrium between parliaments and governments. The pandemic has contributed to an expansion of executive powers to the detriment of accountability mechanisms, weakening parliamentary representatives’ oversight and policy-making capacities. However, there are signs that legislatures have been able to react, innovating their (sometimes) old-fashioned procedures. As for the Ukraine-Russia war, the impact of this shock on executive-legislative relations is still to be investigated in depth.

Executive politics
Executives are prominent in ordinary policymaking – especially in parliamentary democracies – and play a leading role in managing crises. Although topics such as the lifecycle of cabinets and the output of government activity have been extensively studied in the comparative literature, many aspects of executive politics are still to be explored. For example, the governance phase has received far less attention than the stages of government formation and termination. Moreover, our knowledge can be well improved regarding patterns of ministerial stability and personnel continuity between cabinets. Also, the role of technocrats and technocratic expertise in decision-making processes has to be further investigated, especially in the context of the recent crises.

Non-electoral forms of representation
Political theorists have recently emphasised that a representative relation may emerge even outside the electoral context. There is a representative relation whenever someone claims to speak or act on behalf on someone else, provided that such claim is accepted by the relevant audience. Non-electoral representation is very common in democratic systems: social movements and “self-appointed representatives” are typical actors whose aim is to champion a cause without having received a mandate to do so. Non-electoral representation can contribute to the correction of some limitations of the traditional representative institutions and may serve as a preventive force against the hegemonic power of political authorities.

 

In the 21st Century, one of the most recurring topics among scholars of political parties, party behavior, and executive politics in parliamentary democracies has been the decline of mainstream parties. This phenomenon has been examined mostly at the electoral or programmatic level, whereas the institutional arena has been largely understudied. At the same time, new parties have altered traditional patterns of competition, introducing new dynamics in both parliaments and governments. What is even more interesting is the fact that these new parties display very different features in terms of their organizational, ideological and strategic dimensions. Some of them are personal parties, characterized by direct links between leaders and supporters. Populist parties are a different category of new actors that have gained institutional relevance in the recent period. Finally, there are also ‘new’ centrist parties – the most evident case being the French La République en Marche led by Macron -, which have replaced traditional actors.
This panel aims to account for the causes of new parties’ entry in parliaments and governments, as well as the consequences in contemporary European democracies, with a focus on executive politics. Possible research questions are: What is the impact of new parties in terms of descriptive representation? Do MPs from new parties behave in a different way compared to mainstream actors? Under what conditions do new parties enter government? What explains their bargaining power relative to their coalition allies? Looking at new parties as independent – rather than dependent – ‘variables’, further questions can be: what is the effect of new parties’ participation in government in terms of its stability? Do these parties have any effect on the recruitment, composition, and professionalization of executive elites? Why? Are these parties responsive when in government? Is their behavior in the coalition and the behavior of their ministers in the cabinet different relative to their partners and other cabinet personnel? The panel welcomes empirical investigations of particularly interesting single cases as well as genuinely comparative studies. Moreover, scholars are encouraged to submit fine-grained conceptual and theoretical works on the topic, which can improve the state of the art. The panel is meant to be methodologically plural, as long as works are analytical and systematic.

 

Although the electoral outcome was not unexpected, the general elections held in September 2022 opened a new phase for Italian politics, and the legislative term that started after the vote shows a number of peculiarities and some elements of true novelty. The new configuration of the Italian party system and the government’s formation were shaped by the joint impact of several critical events and their repercussions on domestic politics: the pandemic and the related economic crisis, the ongoing migration crisis, the Ukraine-Russia war and all its implications. A centre-right coalition got into government after more than 10 years. For the first time, though, the executive is now led by a radical right party and a woman, Giorgia Meloni, as Prime Minister. Furthermore, from an institutional perspective, the parliament elected in 2022 was a reformed one, as a constitutional revision had reduced the number of representatives in the two chambers. Although this reform did not alter the balance of power between the two branches, it is to be seen whether it has affected or will affect the internal functioning of the parliamentary houses, the recruitment of legislators and the behaviour of the elected representatives inside and outside the institutions.
This panel welcomes papers dealing with topics such as the dynamics of party competition, the process of government formation, the composition of the cabinet and its policy agenda, executive-legislative relations, the interaction between government and opposition, the functioning of the reformed parliament, legislative recruitment and behaviour, and intra-party politics inside and outside the legislative arena. We invite papers employing either quantitative or qualitative methodologies, and either case study or comparative perspective.

 

Although the electoral outcome was not unexpected, the general elections held in September 2022 opened a new phase for Italian politics, and the legislative term that started after the vote shows a number of peculiarities and some elements of true novelty. The new configuration of the Italian party system and the government’s formation were shaped by the joint impact of several critical events and their repercussions on domestic politics: the pandemic and the related economic crisis, the ongoing migration crisis, the Ukraine-Russia war and all its implications. A centre-right coalition got into government after more than 10 years. For the first time, though, the executive is now led by a radical right party and a woman, Giorgia Meloni, as Prime Minister. Furthermore, from an institutional perspective, the parliament elected in 2022 was a reformed one, as a constitutional revision had reduced the number of representatives in the two chambers. Although this reform did not alter the balance of power between the two branches, it is to be seen whether it has affected or will affect the internal functioning of the parliamentary houses, the recruitment of legislators and the behaviour of the elected representatives inside and outside the institutions.
This panel welcomes papers dealing with topics such as the dynamics of party competition, the process of government formation, the composition of the cabinet and its policy agenda, executive-legislative relations, the interaction between government and opposition, the functioning of the reformed parliament, legislative recruitment and behaviour, and intra-party politics inside and outside the legislative arena. We invite papers employing either quantitative or qualitative methodologies, and either case study or comparative perspective.

 

Trust of European citizens in their national parliaments has constantly decreased for the last years, as European politics has been shaken by several crises such as the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic and, more recently, the international crisis caused by the war in Ukraine. The combined effect of these events challenged the capacity of national parliaments to perform their traditional functions. In particular, the pandemic has contributed to an expansion of executive powers to the detriment of accountability mechanisms, thus weakening parliamentary representatives’ oversight and policy-making capacities. Furthermore, the strengthening of surveillance and coordination of the budgetary policy has dramatically reduced the power of the purse of legislative assemblies within the Eurozone.
This panel welcomes papers examining the consequences of the various crises – economic, migration, health crises etc. – on the relationship between citizens and members of parliament, the political career of representatives, the behaviour of parliamentarians, the internal organisation of parliaments, issue-politics in parliament, the legislative process and executive-legislative relations.

 

Recently the word Polycrisis has become very popular to emphasize the fact that, in our current global environment, several crises related to different fields are now interlocked and seem to simultaneously interact with each other, so that the overall scenario becomes more troublesome than the simple sum of those events. Indeed, we are currently facing a variety of emergencies. These emergencies are ranging from environmental issues and (related) natural disasters, to wars or other dangerous geopolitical conflicts, economic drawbacks, massive flows of migrants, not to mention the residual consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is not by chance that in 2022 the term Permacrisis, which refers to the feeling of living through a period of war, inflation, and political instability, has been chosen as Collins Dictionary's word of the year.
Despite that fact that some of these crises seem really interrelated, being endogenous one another, other crises tend to manifest themselves through rather exogenous shocks. In turn, despite the similarities, each crisis also retains some peculiar features that can wield specific consequences on how each emergency is affecting and reshaping everyday politics, political representation as well as the policies discussed and approved in parliamentary assemblies.
In light of this, the panel aims to dig into the different crises that our world is currently facing. Paper that investigates the effects of such crises, in a cross-country comparative setting, are particularly welcome, but the panel is also open to single-crisis or single-country studies that analyze the longitudinal consequences of one emergency for our democracy, either from an empirical or from a theoretical point of view.
This panel is developed under the framework of the PRIN 2020 project DEMOPE “DEMOcracy under PressurE” and aims to expand our network of scholars working on the topic of politics and crises.




“Ho qui per caso il dizionario dei sinonimi. Vediamo cosa dice alla voce crisi. Peggioramento, scompenso, accesso, parossismo, modificazione, perturbazione, difficoltà, dissesto, recessione, depressione, rovina, squilibrio, turbamento, smarrimento, inquietudine, sconcerto.”

 

Recently the word Polycrisis has become very popular to emphasize the fact that, in our current global environment, several crises related to different fields are now interlocked and seem to simultaneously interact with each other, so that the overall scenario becomes more troublesome than the simple sum of those events. Indeed, we are currently facing a variety of emergencies. These emergencies are ranging from environmental issues and (related) natural disasters, to wars or other dangerous geopolitical conflicts, economic drawbacks, massive flows of migrants, not to mention the residual consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is not by chance that in 2022 the term Permacrisis, which refers to the feeling of living through a period of war, inflation, and political instability, has been chosen as Collins Dictionary's word of the year.
Despite that fact that some of these crises seem really interrelated, being endogenous one another, other crises tend to manifest themselves through rather exogenous shocks. In turn, despite the similarities, each crisis also retains some peculiar features that can wield specific consequences on how each emergency is affecting and reshaping everyday politics, political representation as well as the policies discussed and approved in parliamentary assemblies.
In light of this, the panel aims to dig into the different crises that our world is currently facing. Paper that investigates the effects of such crises, in a cross-country comparative setting, are particularly welcome, but the panel is also open to single-crisis or single-country studies that analyze the longitudinal consequences of one emergency for our democracy, either from an empirical or from a theoretical point of view.
This panel is developed under the framework of the PRIN 2020 project DEMOPE “DEMOcracy under PressurE” and aims to expand our network of scholars working on the topic of politics and crises.




“Ho qui per caso il dizionario dei sinonimi. Vediamo cosa dice alla voce crisi. Peggioramento, scompenso, accesso, parossismo, modificazione, perturbazione, difficoltà, dissesto, recessione, depressione, rovina, squilibrio, turbamento, smarrimento, inquietudine, sconcerto.”

 

Many modern democracies experience citizens' disillusionment with politics and political institutions. In response, various democratic innovations are sought and experimented with. Many of these innovations are seen as an antidote to the current dissatisfaction, mistrust and alienation of citizens (voters), although in some cases the results of the experiments are rather disappointing. Nevertheless, the repertoire of political participation is constantly expanding, which results in the increasing complexity of public decision-making processes and affects the legitimacy of institutions in various ways. We are convinced that despite extensive literature on the subject, the issue of democratic innovations requires constant analysis and new explanatory approaches. In this panel, we aim to address several issues of ongoing changes in representative democracy:
- What are the current changes in the field of citizen participation in decision-making?
- How can we asses forms of democratic participation?
- What normative and practical criteria can be used to shape deliberative processes and improve citizen participation in decision-making?
- What are the actual goals and challenges, promises and pitfalls of democratic innovations?
- To what extent can democratic innovations improve the functioning of representative institutions and influence the logic of behavior of political actors?
We would like to examine to what extent the use of various new tools and mechanisms of democracy (including referenda, citizens' legislative initiatives, public hearings, petitions and consultations, deliberative panels, citizens' panels, e-voting, sortition, etc.) has its potential to shape institutional arrangements, influence the quality of policies, and legitimize representative bodies and decision-making processes.
We encourage researchers to submit papers representing different approaches that explore the short- and long-term impact on the dynamics of change in representative democracy, emphasizing new phenomena in its innovative dimension. Both theoretical and empirical papers on this subject are welcome. Proposals with a comparative approach will be particularly appreciated.