Il potere normativo del Governo in Europa: un’analisi comparata a partire dai testi costituzionali

The essay offers a mapping of the themes and issues related to the exercise of the Government’s normative function in European countries where the legislative and executive branches are connected by a relationship of confidence. The examined European constitutions reflect the existence of a shared normative function between Parliament and Government. In particular, three distinct bases for conferring normative authority on the Government can be identified: a) the recognition of the power to adopt implementing reg-ulations of statutes and, at times, a general regulatory power; b) the delegation of normative authority to the Government by Parliament; c) the attribution of an autonomous normative power to the Government, linked either to a specific area of competence or to the occurrence of situations of urgency, necessity, or emergency. In each legal system, the Government’s role in exercising the normative function results from the combina-tion of these different options and from the actual balance of power established between Parliament and Government. These considerations, together with data on the Government’s normative output, reveal the significant centrality of the executive in the production of legislation. This trend is consistent with the grow-ing prominence of Governments within the power dynamics of contemporary systems of government—fur-ther reinforced in recent years by the debt crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Within this framework, Italy holds a particularly distinctive position due to the Government’s prerogative to adopt two types of primary legislation—legislative decrees and law decrees—and the extensive use of both as a matter of practice.