Emergency decrees, enabling laws, execution of regulatory powers: over the past decades, the Government has considerably expanded its regulatory activity, increasingly resorting - starting from 13th parliament - to delegated laws and to deregulation measures as instruments for the implementation of its programme.

Together with the development of the Executive branch's regulatory role, the legislator has upheld the obligation, for the Government, to involve the Parliament in its consultative function and to request its opinion, not only for delegated decrees or for deregulation rules, but - in an increasingly systematic way - also for other types of bills. From 1996 to 2016 the opinion of Parliament Committees was requested 2,786 times. And what were the results? To what extent were the opinions followed up? This is a first statistical analysis of the procedures followed by the Italian Senate, the opinions expressed by the Committees and the Government's reports to Parliament.