Interesting suggestions for reform of the electoral system used for the European Parliament elections found here at RENA:
twenty-one electoral districts, with
at least one seat per district, with
remaining (57?) seats distributed in proportion to population, thus
increasing the effective threshold, if not the legal threshold;
and introducing a quota for female representation
We’ve seen before that Italian politicians don’t know much about the electoral systems of other countries. Now we see that they don’t know much about federalism in other countries either. According to Umberto Bossi,
“Senza il federalismo fiscale, c’e’ il rischio reale che il Paese diventi come l’Argentina…”
“Without fiscal federalism, there’s a real risk that […]
Once upon a time, there were party newspapers: funded by the parties, staffed by the parties, sold to party sympathizers. Or, there were partisan rags, which even if they didn’t have a party connection, seemed as if they did.
According to a number of (predominantly-American) social scientists, partynewspapers declined as the capital costs of launching a […]
Repubblica gives some excellent reportage/hearsay which shows three things:
generally, preference voting is supported by parties with better grassroots organisation;
generally, preference voting is supported by non-leadership groups within parties;
specifically, in the Italian case, preference voting is supported by the non-Veltroni factions in the PD, and the AN within the PdL.
Minister for Public Administration Renato Brunetta launched, a little over a month ago, what he called a ‘transparency operation‘. The idea is to publish online all the details for the personnel of public bodies, including contact details and rates of abstenteeism and other absences, so that Tizio or Caio (the Italian version of Smith or […]
More electoral reform in the air - this time not for national elections, but for next year’s European Parliament elections. Veltroni has come out in favour of a watered-down threshold of 3%, compared to the 5% originally proposed.
Why is Veltroni doing this? Presumably he wants to preserve those other opposition parties - the radical left, […]
The opposition is up in arms about the proposal of the Justice Minister, Angelino Alfano, to place restrictions on the use of telephone interceptions by investigating magistrates.
It’s hard to make the case against some limitation, since the number of wiretaps in Italy dwarfs that of other countries. Affari Italiani claims that 80,000 wiretap requests were […]
From the wonderful (recently extended) Repubblica archive:
“Epoca carried out a survey on lottizzazione in Rai, asking 79 parliamentariansof various parties whether they would look favourably on an overhaul of the party-based division of the three networks and three news bulletins. The noes won: 48 of 100 parliamentarians preferred that things remained as they are, whilst […]
There have been a number of stories recently - and some polling evidence - concerning Walter Veltroni’s leadership of the PD. I wouldn’t like to give an all-encompassing judgement, but he’s a short quote to show that on his favourite topics - cinema and communications - he was bang on the money. Speaking of Rai […]
After packing a previously uncontroversial bill full with measures that would help Retequattro avoid a move to satellite, the government yesterday lost a vote on one of the provisions contained there, on bird protection, of all things.
Gioacchino Alfano, justice minister, has now promised to listen to the opposition’s concerns about Retequattro. Quite what this means […]
