Ideological Disagreement and the Rejection of Laws by Italian Heads of State

Abstract

Heads of state in parliamentary democracies are usually perceived as neutral and non‐partisan political actors. However, they can make autonomous political choices, sometimes oriented by their own partisan preferences. Focusing on the Italian case, we analyze the propensity of the president of the Republic to publicly express political disagreement by rejecting the promulgation of laws. We contribute to the literature by creating and exploiting a new dataset, based on a content analysis of presidents' investiture speeches and New Year's Eve messages which maps the ideological position of Italian heads of state and their distance from the cabinet over more than 75 years (1946–2022). We show that such ideological distance increases the number of laws rejected by the president. This effect holds when controlling for the size and heterogeneity of the government coalition, as well as the state of the economy and the occurrence of crises.