Speaker
Description
Cybersecurity has become central to strategic competition and foreign policy, yet research has focused primarily on executive decision-making, military doctrines, and national cyber strategies, marginalising parliamentary roles in this securitised and technically complex domain. This paper examines how legislatures scrutinise cyber policy in democratic systems.
Using the framework of authority, ability, and attitude, the paper conceptualises parliamentary scrutiny as a form of strategic oversight shaped by legal prerogatives, institutional capacities, and political incentives. Building on the literature on parliamentary war powers and intelligence oversight, it shows how cyber policy blurs boundaries between defence, intelligence, law enforcement, and critical infrastructure governance, thereby challenging established mechanisms of democratic accountability.
The study relies on an original dataset of EU cybersecurity policies and a comparative analysis of five cases: the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany, and Spain. Combining text-as-data techniques, parliamentary metadata, and Institutional Grammar 2.0, it examines who speaks about cyber policy, how extensively, and with which institutional powers. The findings reveal substantial variation in parliamentary scrutiny, shaped by institutional arrangements, strategic ambiguity, and executive dominance.
By situating cyber policy within debates on civil–military relations and foreign policy decision-making, the paper advances understanding of democratic oversight in emerging strategic domains.
| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | No, I am submitting a Closed Panel abstract |
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| Would you like to be considered for travel funding through the NetSec COST Action? | Yes |
| Are you a member of the NetSec Management Committee? | No |
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | strategic studies, public policy, cybersecurity policy |
| Which of the following best describes your stage of the career? | Post-Doc (or within 3-year of PhD obtention) |
| In which country is your home institution? | Italy |
| What is your gender? | Male |