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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on committees in multiparty legislatures in parliamentary democracies focuses on their role in solving intra-cabinet delegation problems. Using a straightforward spatial model, this article discusses how committees can also solve uncertainty problems that arise in settings characterised by unstable coalitions, weak governmental agenda control and a lack of government change. In order to explore empirically how committees solve these problems, the article focuses on the success (and later decline) over the last 30 years of the sede legislativa, a law-making procedure that formalises ‘universalism’ in Italian legislative committees. The statistical results largely confirm the theoretical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars interested in legislative processes pay relatively little attention to the changes made to bills in parliamentary democracies. On the one hand, comparative research has often described parliamentary institutions as ineffectual vis-à-vis cabinets throughout the lawmaking process; on the other hand, for a long time the rational choice literature has focused more on the formal rules regulating amendatory activity than on amendatory activity itself. Hence, very few studies have tried to explain how much government bills are altered in parliament and why. This article investigates the changes made to governmental legislation in Italy. Taking the modifications occurring during the legislative process as the dependent variable, a number of explanatory hypotheses derived from both existing scholarship and original arguments are discussed and tested. This also allows the identification of some usually unobserved aspects of the decision-making process within the cabinet. The findings can also be relevant for comparative research since Italy has been characterised during the period under scrutiny (1987-2006) by two distinct electoral systems, two extremely different party systems (pivotal and alternational), governments with various ideological orientations and range, and both partisan and technical ministers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]