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Courts as extra-cabinet control mechanisms for secondary legislation: evidence from Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2019

Elisa Rebessi Open the ORCID record for Elisa Rebessi [Opens in a new window]  and
Francesco Zucchini
Elisa Rebessi*
Affiliation:
Department of Social and Political Sciences, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy
Francesco Zucchini
Affiliation:
Department of Social and Political Sciences, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy
*
*Corresponding author. Email: elisa.rebessi@unimi.it
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Abstract

Ministers 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.

Keywords

Coalition governancecourtsItalian political systemmultiparty politicssecondary legislation
Type
Research Article
Information
Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 159 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Società Italiana di Scienza Politica 2019

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