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The paper takes into account a feature of Hans Kelsen's juridical thinking that has been so far rather underestimated: the weight of normativism on his theory of private law. The author closely connects Kelsen's critical approach to the notion of subjective right and further relates the legal norms to the institutions of the market economy. The interepretative assumptions of Kelsen are constantly confronted with the theoretical background that propelled the development of the modern constitutional state based on the rule of law.

The debate about the rule of law and the role it plays as driver of democratization processes is now fairly developed and diffused worldwide. Despite that, the concept is still contended and its semantic characterized by a byzantine complexity. Firstly and foremost, political scientists do not share a common conception of rule of law encompassing formal and substantial aspects of the "government based on rules rather than on men". This paper wants to encourage the development of a dialogue between law and politics, legal studies and political science, in order to investigate better and reach a deeper understanding of how and why under specific conditions governments ruled by rules -- which are still made by men -- represent favorable conditions to democratic processes and processes of state building. The readers are led through a vast literature, then provided with a proposal of a framework that covers both the conception of rule of law as precondition and as outcome of socio-political processes. Adapted from the source document.

This article examines the influence of the global financial turmoil on administrative capacity considered within the framework of the quality of democracy. In fact, administrative capacity is a significant component of the rule of law. However, laws consistent with a high democratic quality but deprived of a fair, transparent, efficient and impartial apparatus devoted to implementing them determine a rule of law broad, but shallow. By tracking the reaction to the economic crisis in Italy, this article tests the hypothesis suggested by Dunsire and Hood that episodes of financial austerity invest public administration following a specific sequence of events. The empirical analysis shows that the sequence triggered in Italy by the 2008 crisis has been shaped and constrained by the level of implementation of the different repertoires of responses to the 1992 crisis. The findings reveal that the current crisis has encouraged the adoption of transversal measures aimed at freezing public expenditure while the attempts of bureaucratic modernisation have been sidelined. Consequently, the financial turmoil has negatively affected the Italian administrative capacity. Adapted from the source document.