In Southern Europe, the economic crisis (2008-2013) triggered a deeper political crisis, affecting a number of aspects of a representative democracy. Italy provides a particularly telling case of what happens when an economic crisis occurs in an unstable political context characterized by low government effectiveness, low efficiency, corruption, decline of electoral participation, fragmented and radicalized party competition, social inequality, high public debt, and other related features, here summarized in the model of “stalemated democracy.” On the basis of a comprehensive data set developed along with eight dimensions of democracy assessment and taking into account the policies pursued during the years of the crisis, we analyze the different effects of economic crisis—some of them expected, others more surprising—and how those effects characterize Italian political crisis and a new phase of great uncertainty. In the concluding remarks we offer an explanation of the role played by the economic crisis, focusing on the interplay between veto rules and actual veto players. Such an explanation is also relevant to see key, more in-depth aspects of Italian democracy during last 20 years and earlier.

Judicial independence is traditionally deemed to ensure citizens about the impartiality of adjudication and, by doing so, to guarantee the legitimacy of the authoritative allocation of power that is exercised by a non-elective actor, that is, the judge. However, despite its relevance, this concept in itself cannot cast a proper light on the dynamics and the logics of action judicial actors follow in prosecuting and adjudicating cases. In this paper, the author retains this judicial accountability, with its multiple dimensions, and argues that this may provide promising insights on judicial governance and, accordingly, on the type of constitutionalism exhibited by a country or, as proved in the last section of the paper, in a multilevel system of governance, as the EU. Th e paper associates the reconstruction of judicial governance with the assessment of democratic quality.Keywords judicial independence, accountability, rule of law, quality of democracy, European constitutionalism Over the last three decades, the concept of "rule of law" gained spectacular glamour in international political discourse. New democracies emerged under the blessing aura of this principle (Carothers 2006), whereas countries that featured a hybrid and quasi-democratic regime (Morlino 2009) 1) I am indebted to the editors and to an anonymous referee for comments and remarks addressed to previous versions of this chapter.

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The Italian judiciary has been under the spotlight for more than two decades. The key criticism addressed to it has been the lack of organizational capacity, which is reflected in the trial time frame. After 2000, European institutions launched a new and comprehensive policy stream, targeting the administrative and organizational capacities of courts and public prosecutor offices. The pivotal policy instrument is represented by standards and soft law in general. By referring to four case studies, analysed in depth on the basis of a qualitative approach, this work engages in a critical appraisal of the New Public Management-inspired judicial policies and the way in which they have been implemented in the judicial sector in Italy. Points for practitioners This article makes a point about the structural and institutional conditions that turn out as pivotal factors to ensure an effective and efficient governance by standards. In other terms, the argument deployed herein concerns the function of a regulative agency, which might have the shape and the format of a ministerial unit, where the uniformity and the equality of the services delivered by a public institution or a network of public institutions are the outcome of the implementation of legally binding and non-legally binding norms. This is a key point, then, for public officers serving not only in the judicial sector.