A Judicial-Oriented Decision-Making Process as the Essence of Populism

The decision-making process is under stress all around Europe. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the influence of the current explicit criticism against representative democracy on the slipping of power from politics into judges. By means of an analysis of the most updated italian case-law of the Court of Cassation and the Constitutional Court, we can infer that in Italy – a civil law system – a parallel decision-making circuit exists. In fact, this slipping towards a judicial-oriented decision making process is enforced by the same essence of populism. In fact, the latter is based on the idea of the failure of both the Parliament and, generally, of the representative democracy institutions. In conclusion, the paper aims at offering a fair overlook of the slipping of the decision making process from politics into judges in a civil-law system as Italy.