THE COUNCIL OF STATE AS A POLITICAL ACTOR. ORIGINS AND STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS OF THE CONTROL ON ADMINISTRATIVE ACTS

This work analyzes the Councils of State and more in general the administrative courts as political actors. Councils of State are peculiar unelected bodies that present a double, \u201camphibious\u201d nature. As advisory boards of the government on legislation, they belong to the executive. However, as highest courts responsible for the judicial review of administrative acts, they are also part of the judiciary. Adopting a strategic approach to the analysis of the relations between the legislature and the judiciary, the research investigates the interaction between government and the Council of State in the Italian case. The first question I intend to answer is if the interaction between the two institutions in the process of implementation of primary laws produces different outcomes, according to the political circumstances. More precisely, I analyze the extent to which the level of government ideological heterogeneity and the size of alternation affect the probability to activate the Council of State as Advisor. Second, I try to answer if the political factors that determine the activation of the Council of State in Italy also play a role in influencing the institutional characteristics of courts that review administrative acts in other countries. Following the game theoretical framework adopted for the Italian case, I examine the characteristics of courts that review administrative acts in fifteen European countries, showing the correlation between courts\u2019 institutional features and the prevailing political conditions (taking into consideration the post-Second World War period through the end of the 1990s). The data seem to suggest that the causal mechanisms that explain the activation of the Italian Council of State as Advisor can be behind the different role played by the administrative judiciary in the executive politics in other European Countries

Immigration and political competition in five European countries : a comparative perspective

Since the last three decades, immigration is one of the major phenomena that have been affecting Western Europe, bringing about several important consequences. Indeed, the issue is plenty of implications, both from a societal and political point of view. Does the immigration issue occupy a central position in the European political system? Even in years in which economic questions captured much of the attention of the principal actors (the institutions, political parties, media and public opinion), does this issue remain a constant presence on the public agenda? It should not of course be excluded that the economic crisis and the concerns linked to it, though not completely overshadowing immigration, may have contributed to changing in part its significance, reshaping the definition of the problem in the eyes of the actors. The paper intends to explore the dynamics that immigration has triggered inside the political system. First, we will examine some data and interpretations of the orientations of public opinion. Secondly, we will analyze the policy offerings that political parties formulate in response to the questions posed by public opinion, related to the issue of immigration. To this end, we will examine the principal electoral programs presented by major political parties for the general elections of five countries (France, Greece, Netherlands: 2012; Italy, Germany: 2013), with a focus on the attention received by the specific issue of irregular immigration and the question of the human rights

Was Mattarella worth the trouble? Explaining the failure of the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum

The election of President Mattarella is a turning point in Matteo Renzi\u2019s attempt to reform the constitution. This choice determined the loss of Forza Italia\u2019s support to the constitu- tional reform, thus leaving the Renzi cabinet and the Democratic Party alone on the Yes-side. Our goal is to assess the degree of Renzi\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019 content evaluation on voting behavior

A clustering of heterozygous missense variants in the crucial chromatin modifier WDR5 defines a new neurodevelopmental disorder

WDR5 is a broadly studied, highly conserved key protein involved in a wide array of biological functions. Among these functions, WDR5 is a part of several protein complexes that affect gene regulation via post-translational modification of histones. We collected data from 11 unrelated individuals with six different rare de novo germline missense variants in WDR5; one identical variant was found in five individuals, and another variant in two individuals. All individuals had neurodevelopmental disorders including speech/language delays (N=11), intellectual disability (N=9), epilepsy (N=7) and autism spectrum disorder (N=4). Additional phenotypic features included abnormal growth parameters (N=7), heart anomalies (N=2) and hearing loss (N=2). Three-dimensional protein structures indicate that all the residues affected by these variants are located at the surface of one side of the WDR5 protein. It is predicted that five out of the six amino acid substitutions disrupt interactions of WDR5 with RbBP5 and/or KMT2A/C, as part of the COMPASS (complex proteins associated with Set1) family complexes. Our experimental approaches in Drosophila melanogaster and human cell lines show normal protein expression, localization and protein-protein interactions for all tested variants. These results, together with the clustering of variants in a specific region of WDR5 and the absence of truncating variants so far, suggest that dominant-negative or gain-of-function mechanisms might be at play. All in all, we define a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with missense variants in WDR5 and a broad range of features. This finding highlights the important role of genes encoding COMPASS family proteins in neurodevelopmental disorders

Quando la logica burocratica conviene : nascita ed evoluzione del Consiglio di Stato nel sistema politico italiano

In this article, I provide a rational choice-oriented explanation of how the Council of State became an equilibrium in the Italian political system. The variance of political regimes and governments makes Italy an interesting case to study the stability of the court and its relevance for the political actors and public administration. After pre- senting theories of judicial power and the main evolutions of the Council through history, I argue that government instability and heterogeneity, combined with struc- tural weaknesses of the public administration can be key factors in explaining the long-term survival of the institution

Quando il giudice diventa il consulente giuridico del governo : il ruolo del Consiglio di Stato nella politica dell’esecutivo in prospettiva comparata

With the exception of few important contributions (M\ue9ny 1994, Righettini 1998, RoseAckerrman and Lindseth 2010) the study of the relationship between administrative courts and the executives appears under-investigated from a political science perspective. Administrative courts supervise the lawfulness of government acts and, as a sanction of their control, they can declare administrative decisions void. In the majority of continental European countries, the judicial review of administrative acts is provided by courts organized in a separate system within the judiciary, parallel to civil and criminal tribunals. Less well known is that administrative courts are also, in some countries, involved in the drafting of the administrative acts. In this paper we analyze in-depth the Italian case by considering the interaction between governments and the Council of State, which is the highest administrative court and the most important consultative body of the government. Such analysis sheds light on the political conditions under which government actors decide to avail themselves of the services of the Council of State as advisor. The great variety of the political conditions that have characterized Italy during the last thirty years and the dual role played by the Council (as judge and advisor), allows us to use the Italian case to put forward plausible hypotheses about the country difference in the level of involvement of the administrative courts in executive politics