The activity and legislative achievements of the Renzi government after two years in office

On 22 February 2016, the Renzi government had been in office for 2 years and had become the sixth longest lasting executive in the history of the Italian republic. This article attempts to provide some indicators of the executive’s productivity by presenting certain basic data concerning the Government’s legislative initiatives. In particular, we analyse the number of bills introduced by the Government; the ‘programmatic nature’ of these legislative initiatives (i.e. the link between the measures introduced by the executive, on the one hand, and the Government’s programme, on the other); the ‘strategies’ used by the Government in Parliament, with particular reference to the use of decree laws and confidence votes; the rate of success of government initiatives. All the data presented are analysed from a longitudinal perspective, comparing them with the corresponding data for executives of the recent past beginning in 1996. © The Founding Editors, Contemporary Italian Politics.