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Il contributo analizza le principali prospettive di riforma della Costituzione italiana, nel tentativo di evidenziare la ricchezza degli approcci metodologici che hanno contraddistinto i vari procedimenti di revisione costituzionale. Rispetto ai profili di metodo, si intende brevemente ricostruire in una prospettiva storica il rapporto tra revisioni organiche e revisioni puntuali e tra procedimenti di revisione speciali o ordinari. Tale analisi consentirà di identificare la varietà delle strategie riformatrici perseguite, inquadrandole nel relativo contesto politico-istituzionale ed evidenziandone il collegamento con le consultazioni referendarie. Focalizzando l’attenzione sull’ultima riforma costituzionale, quella relativa alla riduzione del numero dei parlamentari, si evidenzierà come una riforma apparentemente „puntuale” nel suo impatto emendativo sul testo costituzionale possa aprirsi a conseguenze di grande impatto nel rapporto delle due Camere sia con gli elettori che con il Governo. Se ne richiameranno quindi le più significative interazioni con la riforma elettorale e con i regolamenti parlamentari. Tale riflessione consentirà, in conclusione, di sottolineare come il processo attuativo che accompagna una riforma costituzionale svolga un ruolo determinante nel definirne la portata e l’impatto. Le grandi o piccole riforme non si valutano tanto nel numero di articoli costituzionali modificati, ma piuttosto nella capacità complessiva di un intero sistema di accompagnare il cambiamento sul piano delle attuazioni e integrazioni legislative, dell’interpretazione costituzionale, della modifica delle consuetudini in essere.

The article introduces the special issue on ‘Administering Representative Democracy. The European Experience of Parliamentary Administrations in Comparative Perspective’, explaining how it seeks to...

The Covid-19 emergency has profoundly challenged the interactions between the legislative and the executive branches of government: while executives have assumed a predominant role in law-making, p...

Parliamentary administrations play a fundamental role in support to their institutions.However, a clear comparative picture of whether, and if so how, the internal organisation of parliamentary adm...

The article draws comparisons between inter-parliamentary cooperation in the European Union and at the international level. It recognises that, notwithstanding a strong international imprint, inter-parliamentary relations in the EU have gradually experienced somewhat distinctive pushes, deeply embedded in the unique constitutional arrangement of the Union. On the one hand, the composite nature of EU constitutionalism, and its impact on parliaments’ relationship with the democratic oversight rationale, have exercised a major influence on the aims and scope of inter-parliamentary cooperation. On the other hand, from the organisational point of view, the distinctive structure of parliamentary representation in the EU has pushed inter-parliamentary arrangements into a multi-layered design, consisting of a large variety of vertical formats. The article argues that inter-parliamentary cooperation in the EU is expected to act as a sui generis practice when compared to apparently similar forms of transnational dialogue amongst parliaments. In theory, at least, the EU sets ideal conditions for fulfilling an authentic collective parliamentary dimension, instrumental to the democratic oversight of the executives. Instead, focusing on the practice, the full potential of EU inter-parliamentarism is not yet fulfilled, for two set of reasons: the unresolved ambiguities over its contribution to parliamentary democracy and the lack of a real capacity to depart from the formats of international parliamentary institutions.

This special issue develops a contextual analysis of EU inter-parliamentary cooperation in the post Lisbon Treaty framework. Indeed, it is possible to claim that there are several sources and causes for renewed EU inter-parliamentary cooperation: first, a voluntary one, i.e. the connection with the Lisbon Treaty’s intent to facilitate a wider democratisation objective; second, this time more a reaction than an initiative, the need to counterbalance the institutional outcomes of the economic and financial crisis that shook the world but particularly the eurozone; and, third, the call for an improvement in existing rules and mechanisms to develop even further democratic (read: parliamentary) input in common policies. The special issue analyses whether current inter-parliamentary mechanisms are suited to react to these challenges. It specifically assesses the practical impact of interparliamentary cooperation on the numerous democratic gaps that still exist in the EU's multi-layered decision-making process. Its objective is to show, beyond the mere sharing of information and the comparison of best practices at a supranational and transnational level, whether existing inter-parliamentary practices contribute to joint parliamentary scrutiny by involving both the EP and the national parliaments of EU member states.

Post-legislative scrutiny (PLS) is not completely new to European parliamentarism. In the last few decades, this activity has experienced rapid development, either pushed by supranational trends on better regulation or fostered by national constitutional reforms. However, the involvement of parliaments in the ex post stage of law-making still remains under-theorised. This article aims at providing a comparative overview of the main rules, practices and trends on post-legislative scrutiny in Europe, focusing on the experience of three bicameral Parliaments: the French, Italian and Swiss Parliaments which have been selected as examples of three proactive approaches to post-legislative scrutiny, based on alternative bicameral arrangements. After providing a general overview of the main options that support the involvement of parliaments in the ex-post stage of law-making, the article examines how the benchmark case studies address the following variables: the internal organisation of the ex-post scrutiny, including the role of the administrative staff; the scrutiny object, either referred to single pieces of legislation or to a whole policy; the scope of the ex-post scrutiny, verifying whether it is interpreted as a purely legal dimension or it comprises also forms of impact assessment; the outcomes of the ex-post scrutiny, and more specifically its contribution to the legislative decision-making. The paper demonstrates that PLS in parliament may lead to political outcomes addressing the government when the form of government, the constitutional framework and the party dimension support a competitive use of this tool in the legislative-executive interaction.

In the EU institutional architecture, parliamentary oversight of economic and fiscal policies is weakened by the existence of spheres of activity that tend to escape from the two ordinary channels ...

In the last few years, the European integration process has increasingly resorted to flexible mechanisms of co-operation and decision-making, involving only a limited number of European Union (EU) Member States. The economic and financial crisis itself - and above all the response of the EU to the crisis - has undoubtedly favoured the trend.These ongoing asymmetric mechanisms deeply challenge the supranational architecture upon which the EU experience is based, determining a major change in the formal role and powers of both the European and national institutions. In particular, the European Parliament is incapable of adapting its internal functioning to the asymmetric schemes. In order to contrast these trends, some hypotheses of reform have been formulated, aiming either at building a new institution, a sort of Euro-Parliament; or at adapting the internal organisation of the EP to ongoing asymmetric tendencies limiting the voting rights of MEPs.The essay challenges both these hypothesis, assuming that responding to the increasing asymmetries of the EU by making the existing institutions, above all the European Parliament, more asymmetric, would consistently endanger the cohesion of the Union and threaten the good functioning of its governing bodies. Rather, the approach should be based upon a re-consideration of the overall representative circuit upon which the EU is founded. This implies that an even more asymmetric EU will have to rely on its traditional channels of parliamentary representation: what will need to change is not related to the nature or the format of parliamentary representation, but rather to its operative patterns, which should count on strengthened cooperation among parliaments to accommodate asymmetric tendencies in the EU governance with flexible forms of interaction in the scrutiny of such procedures.

In the last decades, parliamentary representation at domestic level has been challenged in multiple ways by so-called ‘passive’ Europeanization (Auel 2007: 427). On the one hand, the EU integration process has clearly favoured the predominance of the executive branch (Weiler, Haltern and Mayer 1995: 7; Schmidt 1999: 25) in so-called ‘ascending’ subsidiarity — the stage of participation in the production of EU norms (Garofalo 2006: 28) — and often also in ‘descending’ subsidiarity, the phase dedicated to the transposition and implementation of EU legislation. On the other hand, the national parliaments have been coming to terms with the idea that they are not isolated, but are, instead, involved in a complex network of representation in which collective decisions are taken at multiple levels (Crum and Fossum 2009: 267). National parliaments have lost their role as single representatives of popular sovereignty as a consequence of the dissolution of nation-state sovereignty in a supranational and transnational governance model (Cohen 2004). The EU impact on regional assemblies has been even stronger, overwhelmed by the enlargement of the executive branch both at the national and regional level (Perez Tremps 1991: 93).

Od momentu zainicjowania wspolnotowej przestrzeni socjalnej ochrona praw socjalnych stanowila powazne wyzwanie. W chwili obecnej zachodzą jednak duze zmiany w zakresie praw socjalnych i polityki socjalnej, a wymownym tego przykladem jest Dyrektywa 2011/24/UE w sprawie transgranicznej opieki zdrowotnej, w ktorej upatruje sie potencjalny punkt zwrotny w europejskim modelu spolecznym. Autorka przekonuje, ze kwestia ochrony praw socjalnych początkowo nie nalezala do priorytetow Wspolnot Europejskich, ktore pozostawialy panstwom czlonkowskim odpowiedzialnośc za funkcjonowanie systemow opieki socjalnej. Ostatecznie jednak interesy ekonomiczne podporządkowane tworzeniu jednolitego rynku nie powstrzymaly instytucji europejskich, a w szczegolności Europejskiego Trybunalu Sprawiedliwości, przed wyodrebnieniem sfery ochrony socjalnej obywateli UE, ale konsekwencją tak ksztaltowanej europejskiej integracji spolecznej byl jej instrumentalny charakter w stosunku do integracji gospodarczej, odzwierciedlony w utrwalonej linii orzeczniczej. Zintegrowany model transgranicznej opieki zdrowotnej, ze wzgledu na swoj innowacyjny charakter, moze wytyczyc nowe ściezki rozwoju europejskiej integracji spolecznej. Jest on bowiem zgodny zarowno ze zwiekszonymi ograniczenia finansowymi wywolanymi przez kryzys gospodarczy, a zarazem spojny z odrebnościami poszczegolnych krajow. Tlumaczenie: K. Jachimowicz