Strong interests, weak groups? The structure and strategies of interest groups in Italian transport policy

Abstract

This article discusses the role of interest groups in the field of Italian transport policy. It looks at the patterns of stability and change emerging from this field for more than 20 years after the main reforms. For national policymakers, the implementation of European Union’s transport regulations represented an extraordinary opportunity to address the field of transport in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Industrialisation of the production chain and better integration among different transport modes were generally identified as the main policy goals. In parallel to this institutional change, interest groups underwent several organisational changes that brought more cooperation and integration within major peak associations such as Confindustria and Confcommercio. Such attempts, nonetheless, proved to be ineffective and in many cases related to the contingent and particularistic strategies of both newcomers and incumbents, which had to adapt to a rapidly changing political and institutional environment. Fragmentation thus emerged as a stable pattern in the field of transport and will be interpreted in connection with the lack of integration of the whole policy. Changes occurred in the relations between groups and the political system, which seem in fact to be increasingly loosely connected, while organised interests maintained solid connections with bureaucratic actors, whose centrality has been hampered by the regulatory turn in European transport policy.