Keywords: Parliament, political institutions, politics and policies, disintermediation, crisis of law
This paper analyses some current tendencies of the Italian political and institutional
system that point towards a diminished role for the Italian Parliament. The difficulties that
the Italian Parliament encounters range from its inability to cope with complex and longterm
policies to its uneasy role in the age of disintermediation; from the declining role of the law as an instrument of policy-making to the (mis)use of political institutions as actors
in the so-called «media circus». The paper offers a constructive point of view for each of
these issues, with the objective of identifying a new role for parliamentary activity, through
the strengthening of mechanisms of evaluation, advice and control, and exploring its potential
of becoming a qualified big-data hub.