What is ILMA

The Italian Law-Making Archive (ILMA) is a relational database that non-redundantly combines in a single infrastructure different pieces of information on the Italian legislative process coming from heterogeneous sources.

ILMA originated from an idea of a group of scholars affiliated with the Department of Social and Political Studies at the Università degli Studi di Milano, and it is one of the scientific products of the Center for the Observation of Legislatures (COoL) .

ILMA was developed with the collaboration of Marco Mesiti and Paolo Perlasca of the Department of Computer Science of the Università degli Studi di Milano and Alessandro Volpe.

What is ILMA about

ILMA includes data on:
  • legislation: laws and legislative decrees;
  • legislative initiatives and processes;
  • people: MPs, ministers and junior ministers (including repetitions) with their role in the legislatures and their affiliation in the governments;
  • parliamentary parties (including renaming and changes) and their ideological position;
  • a guided analysis of the roll-call in the Chamber of Deputies.
In the current version data cover a period that ranges from the beginning of the 10th legislature inaugurated on July 2, 1987, to the end of the 15th legislature on April 28, 2008.

Quantitative and qualitative data are stored in different tables characterized by unique keys and linked to each other by relations. Through the present web interface, this infrastructure permits scholars to extract, through queries, only those data necessary for their empirical studies.

Here you can download the structure of the database and a codebook with all the variables contained in the different tables.

To access the data

To access the data it is necessary to register filling out the following form.

If you are already registered you can access to the data using your login and password.

Data can be displayed on the web pages and exported in csv format.

All the data included in ILMA is free to download for use in your own research, but please make sure to cite it properly. The correct way to cite these data is:

Borghetto Enrico, Luigi Curini, Marco Giuliani, Alessandro Pellegata and Francesco Zucchini. 2012. “Italian Law-Making Archive (ILMA): A new tool for analysis of the Italian legislative process”, Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 42(3): 479-500.


Contact details

For any request of information please contact us at ilma@coolresearch.net

Partners

Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali e Politiche

Italian Policy Agendas project

CIRCaP