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Italian Political Parties and Military Operations: An Empirical Analysis on Voting Patterns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2018

Fabrizio Coticchia  and
Valerio Vignoli
Fabrizio Coticchia*
Affiliation:
Fabrizio Coticchia, Department of Political Science, University of Genova, Genova, Italy
Valerio Vignoli
Affiliation:
Valerio Vignoli, Department of Political Science, University of Milan, Milan, Italy
*
*Corresponding author. Email: Fabrizio.coticchia@unige.it
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Abstract

Since the end of the bipolar era, the military activism of several Western powers has raised questions about parliamentary control, fostering growing research and analyses on the features, drivers and consequences of the different kinds of oversight exercised by legislative assemblies. Within this scholarly debate, this article focuses on the under-studied case of Italy. How did Italian parties vote on military operations abroad in the post-Cold War era? In order to answer this question, the article presents the first detailed and comprehensive set of data on parliamentary votes over the deployment of the Italian armed forces in the post-Cold War era (i.e. from the beginning of the 1990s to the recent operation against ISIL). Thanks to this extensive new empirical material, the article assesses selected arguments developed by the literature on political parties and foreign policy, paving the way for further research.

Keywords

parliamentary oversightmilitary deploymentpartisanshipforeign policyItalyparliamentary war powers

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 456 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press

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