Poteri (quanto) forti? L'influenza di banche e assicurazioni italiane sulle politiche di liberalizzazione dei mercati

A growing number of political scientists has recently rediscovered the analysis of interest groups. Among the studies that are now crowding this traditional research field, in this work I concentrate on those who deal with the empirical measurement of interest groups influence over the policy-making process. In this sense, I thus analysed the influence exerted by the National Association Among Insurance Companies (ANIA) and the Italian Banking Association (ABI) over two very important Italian decision-making processes: the conversion of dl 223/2006 on the law n. 248/2006 (‘prima lenzuolata di liberalizzazioni Bersani’), and of dl 7/2007 on the law n. 40/2007 (‘seconda lenzuolata di liberalizzazioni Bersani’). From a theoretical point of view, I argued that interest groups influence depends on the interplay between the quantity and quality of those groups’ organizational resources and the characteristics of issues about which such resources are displayed. Methodologically, I claimed that we can only measure pro status quo influence under two simultaneous conditions: policy makers with whom interest groups negotiate should not politically change between the beginning and the end of such negotiation process; this interaction must be as short as possible. That said, the empirical analysis shows that both ABI and ANIA are much less influential than it is commonly assumed. The reasons why of such dynamic are likely to deal with the high political salience and low technical complexity of the measures they had to respond to, on the one hand, and the nature of the resources they traditionally hold, on the other. Facing issues around which public attention was strong, or about which a particular level of expertise was not indispensable, their resources reveal themselves as not appropriate to the context; in this way, they turned out to be impractical in order to influence policy outcomes.