Nearly 200 years of history, millions of advisory opinions and judgements, thousands of councillors – the Consiglio di Stato (Council of State) stands among Italy’s most enduring political institutions. Established in the Albertine era as a body designed to assist the king, it has evolved over the centuries, carving out an increasingly prominent place within Italy’s democratic politics. Two main levers make it an ambiguous and powerful specialised court as it serves both as an adviser and as an adjudicator to the government.
In roughly 100 pages – ranging from its origins and evolution to the reasons why governing majorities rely on it – Il consigliere giudicante. Il Consiglio di Stato nel sistema politico italiano offers a concise account of the Council’s role within the Italian political system. The authors immediately foreground the limits of the current public and academic debate, which tends to oscillate between two unsatisfying genres: scandal-driven journalism about a technocratic nomenklatura and legal scholarship focused on descriptive analyses. For these reasons, the book’s first merit lies in being one of the few critical works on the topic from a political-science perspective, with the book treating the Consiglio di Stato as a political actor to be explained and interpreted using political-science theories and methods.
The book’s analytical framework draws from rational choice institutionalism. Structured in five chapters, it follows a clear progression: a short comparative analysis of administrative courts, theories of judicial behaviour, the historical evolution of the Italian Council of State, a quantitative analysis of contemporary usage, and reform proposals.
In the first chapter, the book provides a synthetic genealogy of Councils of State in Europe, from medieval advisory courts to the basic characteristics of the ‘Napoleonic model’. It investigates the plausible political conditions under which such an ‘amphibious’ body – simultaneously adviser and judge – can persist; in so doing, it shows that Italy’s institutional design, while peculiar, is not unique. The authors suggest that such arrangements are more likely in consensual democracies, while offering a set of suggestive parallels rather than a fully specified comparative research design.
The second chapter explores theories of judicial politics regarding administrative courts, and introduces readers to spatial models of strategic interaction, thus providing the theoretical foundation for subsequent analysis. The authors stress how these courts represent strategic actors whose decisions shape policy during the implementation phase, and whose autonomy can be understood as an equilibrium among elected principals. Therefore, by diving into the world of administrative justice and secondary legislation, where ‘politics’ has often been presumed absent, the authors connect general theories and mechanisms to the Italian context.
The third chapter focuses on the Italian case and investigates the challenges of reconciling the Council of State within the trajectory of the Italian Republic. It explores how this institution has crossed regimes and centuries, surviving institutional reforms and political transformations. Specifically, this chapter observes that government instability and heterogeneity, combined with structural weaknesses in the public administration, can be key factors in explaining the long-term transformation – and expansion – of this policy-conserving institution in Italian politics. Nevertheless, this section could have been further strengthened by a clearer account of the evolution of the relationship between the Italian Council and the regional administrative courts.
In the fourth chapter, the book investigates why governments request ex ante review by the Council of State, even though this procedure can slow their own political agenda. The authors operationalise political conditions such as the level of government heterogeneity and government alternation and test these conditions with logistic regressions on a dataset of 1,453 observations regarding secondary legislation. The headline finding is that more heterogeneous coalitions are likely to activate the Council’s ex ante review; by contrast, alternation works in the opposite direction. Substantively, the Consiglio di Stato functions as an extra-cabinet control device that helps mitigate opportunistic behaviour by individual ministries (and parties), albeit at the cost of legislative delay. This is also where the book addresses the much-debated practice of appointing councillors to key ministerial roles (chiefs of staff, legislative offices, legal advisers). According to the authors, ministers recruit councillors in key ministerial roles to anticipate objections and draft more defensible policies ‘without running excessive risks that those measures will later be sanctioned by administrative justice itself’ (p. 86). In other words, those who advise on the drafting of policies may later participate in judging them in administrative litigation.
The last chapter, inspired by the French case, proposes a reform consisting of separating councillors who judge from those who advise, reducing the Council’s judicial workload and transitioning to a more ‘cassation-like’ apex role. Recent data underscore the urgency of this issue: in 2022, the Council of State defined 16,141 cases while 20,805 were still pending at the year’s end. Simultaneously, the authors call for a greater integration of a social-science perspective on the topic to enable ‘a comparison between how the world must be imagined working for rules to produce the intended effect and how it actually works, based on empirical evidence’ (p. 92).
In sum, Il consigliere giudicante is a welcome addition to the field of political science and a valuable reference for scholars of Italian politics. Its main limitation is not what it does but what it leaves open for future empirical analysis. First, the argument could be strengthened by a systematic comparison with other administrative courts, especially under conditions of democratic backsliding and declining democratic quality. In Italy, this is particularly relevant today given that the dual function of the Consiglio di Stato makes it a natural intersection between the institutional core of government and the hyper-personalised logic of executive power. Second, the analysis would benefit from more extensive coverage of the Council’s role in contentious policy areas, with the addition of case-based sections to complement the statistical analysis. These sections could help the reader better grasp the causal chain by showing the Consiglio di Stato in action. Under this scenario, future research should further examine this subject by focusing on the Council’s status as a ‘specialised’ court and its implications for relations with both the ordinary judiciary and the public administration.
Ultimately, the Consiglio di Stato seems to live up to its own motto, nec flector, nec frangor (neither bent nor broken), while remaining a central and long-overlooked institution that actively shapes policymaking.
