Between policies and politics: the transformations of the budgetary process in Italy

The thesis studies the Italian budget policy throughout the last three decades. Specifically, I study the budget as a policy container and instrument in the executive’s hands to carry out its mandate implementing single favorite policies; the budgetary process that leads to the final approval of the annual document and the rules of procedure that regulate its management; the politics of the budget and the balance of power between the several actors that contribute to its implementation and the role of the multilevel economic governance. Weaving together all these aspects, the mixed-method analysis conducted in the thesis shows at first that governments are able to ideologically alter the budget only when discretionary spending functions are concerned, especially when there is a sudden necessity to retrench. The reason of the weak role of partisan ideology on spending adjustments lies in the extreme complexity of the budget itself and on its incremental nature, as proved throughout the study. Sudden moments of budget punctuations interrupt rarely a long-lasting pattern of marginal changes, stabilized by systemic frictions. In the tension caused by the opposite purposes of a twofold reforming process at domestic and supranational level, the high density of the budgetary process reins the magnitude of spending adjustments in. Moreover, the domestic process of reform and even more the continuous normative stretching that happens during the discussion and approval phases of the budget have caused the alienation of the parliament which in many occasions is not able anymore neither to read the (alleged) most important document of the year that contains its economic policy objectives, nor to protect the oppositions against any potential shove of the majority.