Choosing Between the Government and the Regions: An Empirical Analysis of the Italian Constitutional Court Decisions

Nuno Garoupa, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lucia Dalla Pellegrina, Universita Bocconi

Abstract

We test the extent to which political variables can explain the behavior of constitutional judges in Italy when dealing with conflicts between the central government and regions. We study two competing hypotheses. One hypothesis argues that we should expect some alignment between the political preferences of the judges and the success of the central government primarily due to the appointment mechanism. Another hypothesis suggests that there should be no systematic alignment between the political preferences of the judges and the success of the central government. Unlike previous literature, our empirical results seem to confirm that when the Rapporteur and the Court’s majority are allegedly affiliated with the Prime Minister’s coalition, the odds of success of the Prime Minister go up.