Processo diritti tv, rinviati a giudizio Berlusconi e Confalonieri - cronaca - Repubblica.it

I don't know what this says about differences in news values between Italy and the UK, but the BBC ran the story about Berlusconi's indictment for fraud first on its UK RSS feed, Repubblica online, fifth, and Corriere third - behind news about the ongoing Juventus match-fixing scandal and other World Cup news. Possibilities: the Italian media doesn't like to hit Berlusconi; or it was perfectly obvious to Italian observers that sooner or later Berlusconi would get hit again.

Technorati Tags: RAI, Corriere, Repubblica, Berlusconi, BBC

Majority infight #2

Majority infight number two comes from a different quarter: Clemente Mastella (Udeur), Justice Minister, makes ominous noises about withdrawing from the government coalition and pledging instead 'external support' to the Prodi government - and this because the coalition's recently-announced plan to liberalise various professions touches on certain functions previously assigned to the Justice Minister.

Questions:

1. When Mastella talks about "espropriazioni di titolarità che toccano [a lui]", does he mean grants of authority somehow contained in a written statement of the Justice ministry's remit, or simply authority given to the Justice Minister by previous laws? If the latter, his outburst seems a bit petulant
2. Was this discussed in the Council of Ministers - and wouldn't Mastella have had the chance to bitch about it then?
3. If Mastella did bitch about it then - and was sufficiently annoyed to threaten 'appoggio esterno', did no-one react to this threat?
4. Does he actually believe that a Justice Minister in this day and age should have authority over professional associations in a manner that, in some cases, harks back to the Fascist era?

(By the way, if anyone can find the text of the 'decreto Bersani', they're better at using the Gazzetta Ufficiale site than I. Not that that necessarily says much, or that one would even wish to claim such a thing).
Technorati Tags: Mastella, Udeur, Prodi, government, majority

Punning prostitution

Who knew the Italian press could do puns?

Referendum lost through failures in the Casa

More information which suggests why the referendum was lost comes from Renato Mannheimer's column in yesterday's Corriere (available through Brunik). Here are the relevant cross-tabs:

So, the centre-right was less able to bring its supporters to the polls. As David suggested to me, the 20% of 'traitorous' centre-right supporters is probably accounted for by the centre-right's votes in the South (who have less influence in this because fewer of them voted).

In the North, the provincial data now available shows that, within the Northern provinces, the profile of the 'si' voter was quite close to that of the Lega voter - that is, typically resident in the Northern countryside and smaller cities, not in the regional capitals, which all voted 'No', even in Milan.

Technorati Tags: devolution, referendum, casadelleliberta, leganord, mannheimer

Majority infight #1

This story on the forthcoming parliamentary vote on the re-financing of the Italian mission in Afghanistan. The Partito dei Comunisti Italiani (16 seats in the Camera; 11 in the Senato along with the Greens) has threatened to vote against. It seems that the government may win a majority with the aid of the UDC.

This after two motions of confidence yesterday on two essential decrees - the milleproroghe (a package bill which prolongs the life of certain house-keeping decrees) and the "spacchettamento-ministeri" law (which assigns ministerial portfolios). The motions of confidence were won 160-0, with the opposition abstaining in an attempt to deprive the government of quorum. I find this particularly Italian manouevre quite distasteful. Picture from the vote below:

Freedom House report

Looks like the attentive blogger at menteindependente picked up on the 2006 Freedom House report on freedom of the media: Italy remains in 79th place in the world, with a classification of 'partly free'. Italy is, along with Turkey, the only European country with this classification. Unfortunately, the 2006 report doesn't seem to be available on the Freedom House site. Perhaps Mediaset (the source cited) jumped the gun on this. The global rankings are available at the Freedom House website.

Why was the referendum lost?

More analysis on the weekend's referendum. A number of hypotheses:

1. Voters judged that the referendum would worsen the position of economically disadvantaged regions relative to economically advantaged regions; we should expect the referendum to be lost most heavily in the most economically disadvantaged regions
2. Voters judged that the referendum would worsen the position of the South and Islands relative to the Centre and the North, and would worsen the position of the Centre relative to the North; we should expect the referendum to be lost most heavily in the South and Islands, less so in the Centre, and least of all in the North
3. Voters followed party cues (1); voters who supported parties of the centre-right should vote for the proposal
4. Voters followed party cues (2); voters who supported Forza Italia and the Lega Nord should vote for the proposal

The following table presents the regions in order of their geographic affiliation (North/Centre/South&Islands), support for the referendum proposal, GDP per capita in 2003 euros, and total centre-right support in the 2006 elections to the Senate. Lower numbers indicate more support, more money, and more centre-right support.

	Referendum	Economic	Centre-right
Piemonte	3	5	7
Valle d'Aosta	5	2	-
Lombardia	2	1	4
Veneto	1	6	3
Liguria	4	7	12
Emilia Romagna	8	3	16
Toscana	12	8	18
Umbria	10	10	14
Marche	7	9	9
Lazio	6	4	8
Abruzzi	9	11	5
Molise	13	12	10
Campania	16	16	15
Puglia	15	17	6
Basilicata	17	14	17
Calabria	18	18	11
Sicilia	11	15	2
Sardegna	14	13	13
(Valle d'Aosta)	(-)	(-)	1

The use of ordinals is a quick-and-easy compensation - we can try and forgive a little fuzziness caused by a big difference in ordinal rankings caused by minimal cardinal rankings.

Hypothesis 1: is broadly confirmed; the difference between ordinal referendum support and ordinal economic standing is less than or equal to two places with the exception of Sicilia, the Veneto, Basilicata, Toscana, and Emilia Romagna. The first two were more likely to support the referendum proposal than economic position would suggest; the remaining three less likely to support the referendum proposal than economic position would suggest. Sicilia and the Veneto are regions in which Forza Italia has considerable strength; Toscana and Emilia Romagna are regions in which the left has considerable strength. Basilicata has been won by the centre-left in the last two regional elections, but is not noted for centre-left strength.

Hypothesis 2: Hypothesis 2 is similar to Hypothesis 1 (since regions in the South tend to be poorer), but is less fine-grained and is subject to similar counter-examples, particularly Sicilia and Emilia Romagna.

Hypothesis 3: Hypothesis 3 tends to fail because the differences in centre-left/centre-right support tend to be much les strong (and so consequent to much greater ordinal confusion) than differences in referendum support.

Hypothesis 4: I haven't yet the disaggregated data to test Hypothesis 4 - but it would have to improve on Hypothesis 3 to be of much interest.

So, perhaps the conclusion should be this: the relative economic position of the regions was a relatively good predictor of their relative support for the referendum proposal, with more economically advanted regions supporting the proposal, except in party strongholds of the White and Red Belt, and in Sicilia.