Making the analysis of the Italian legislative system easy : the ILMA web portal

The Italian Law-Making Archive, denoted ILMA, is a new web application for supporting the analysis of the Italian legislative processes. It aims to overcome the shortcomings that commonly affect quantitative analyses of legislative systems providing ready-to-use data on the Italian context organized in a relational structure and included in a unique repository. After having compared ILMA with other web information systems, the article describes the database architecture, proposes several examples of potential customized analyses that scholars may conduct through ILMA and, finally, explains its main functionalities for querying the database and exporting data.