Suchergebnisse

AbstractMinisters can have an incentive to adopt policies through secondary legislation that deviates from the general compromise reached via the primary legislation. We suggest that when secondary legislation is at stake, in some countries coalition partners can rely upon the ex-ante legal scrutiny of courts as an extra-cabinet control mechanism. We focus on the interaction between governments and the Council of State, the highest administrative court and the most important consultative body of the government in Italy. Our findings support the general hypothesis that the Council's activism as an advisor is generated by the demand for control mechanisms on the secondary legislation. Such a demand is affected by specific political conditions, i.e. the level of government heterogeneity and government alternation. The findings on the Italian case can be a starting point for research on the different levels of involvement of administrative courts in the executive politics that characterize European Democracies.

AbstractIf we examine the current literature, no study on policy agenda has so far addressed the agenda of a Constitutional Court in a country that has recently experienced crucial changes in its political system. The present contribution on the Italian Constitutional Court seeks to bridge this gap. We aim at assessing the role the Italian Court plays in the policy process in both the First and the Second Republic by answering two research questions: (1) in its decisions does the Court accommodate themes that are neglected in the parliamentary legislative process? (2) Does the Court (and if so, how often) represent interests and values in opposition to the interests and values supporting the current legislative majorities? By employing an original data set that puts together all decisions of constitutional illegitimacy under incidental review between the years 1983 and 2013, we found that in both Republics Court's agenda is significantly more concentrated than Parliament's agenda, and it does not broadly offer an alternative access point to the policy-making for new or neglected issues. However, at the same time, the alternational system of the Second Republic seems to trigger more immediate and 'salient' reactions from the Constitutional Court, which in that period becomes more prone to sanction recent legislation.

The election of President Mattarella is a turning point in Matteo Renzi's attempt to reform the constitution. This choice determined the loss of Forza Italia's support to the constitutional reform, thus leaving the Renzi cabinet and the Democratic Party alone on the Yes-side. Our goal is to assess the degree of Renzi's misjudgment by comparing two theoretical perspectives on voting behavior in direct-democratic settings through a nested design. Our results highlight that vote choices can be explained by both the systematic and the heuristic modes of information processing. Respondents' agreement with the content of the reform (systematic mode) and a positive evaluation of the Renzi cabinet (heuristic mode) are key predictors of Yes vote. Instead, the negative assessment of the economic situation is a crucial driver of No vote. Lastly, we build a bridge between these two perspectives by showing that partisan attachments conditioned the effect of respondents' content evaluation on voting behavior.