Presidentialising technocracy in Italy: evidence from the Monti and Draghi governments

This article investigates the relationship between the Italian President of the Republic (PoR) and technocratic governments, focusing on the Monti and Draghi cabinets. We develop the concept of ‘presidentialising technocracy’ to capture how external shocks and declining partisan capacity transform technocratic cabinets into instruments of presidential authority, and on this basis propose a typology of technocratic governments according to the degree of presidential influence in government formation and policy-making. Empirically, the study combines process tracing of political and institutional crises with Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) of nearly 6000 semantic events (Subject – Verb – Object triplets) extracted from the official diaries of Presidents Napolitano and Mattarella. The findings classify both cabinets as presidential technocratic governments, showing that crises can expand presidential discretion in the cases examined and tend to enable the Head of State to shape formation of the executive and its agenda, as reflected in policy trajectories. In comparative perspective, the Italian case raises the question of whether presidentialised technocracy under crisis conditions should be regarded as an anomaly, an outlier, or an early sign of broader transformations in parliamentary regimes.