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, “amphibious” 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’ 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.