Enhancing the quality of legislation: the Italian experience

ABSTRACT The article is based on the observation of an increasingly poor quality of legislation in Italy which has led to citizens experiencing disaffection towards regulatory instruments and, at the same time, mistrust in the institutions responsible for producing, implementing and enforcing legislation. This situation has certainly become more and more serious during the Covid-19 pandemic with the adoption of regulatory acts containing rules that, on the one hand, severely restrict citizens’ freedoms and, on the other, are improvised, often contradictory and difficult to understand and interpret. Starting from this observation, the article analyses the reasons of this crisis, focusing on the complexity of a multi-level system, with the increasing influence of the legislation coming from the European Union, and on the growing weakness of parliamentary institutions and the consequent increase in government legislative power through ‘decree-laws’. The urgency and ‘occasionality’ that frequently characterises these law-making procedures are not compatible with a legislative design focused on better regulation tools, thereby making the commitment to clarity, consistency and homogeneity of legislative acts completely regressive. In this context, it is essential to increase the transparency of the legislative process and to enable citizens and stakeholders to take part in it, thereby restoring confidence in legislation. It is also necessary to bring together in the legislative rule-making process different professional skills and knowledge: legal, linguistic, economic-financial, statistical, social and even behavioural sciences. This will shape legislative intervention geared towards making regulatory acts as capable as possible of producing a phenomenon of spontaneous compliance with the objectives set by the legislation. Finally, these tools must be accompanied by a shift in political culture and a change in vision shared by all institutional actors, starting from Parliament, in order to recompose the material Constitution of the country on new bases.