Street-level Bureaucrats and Coping Mechanisms.The Unexpected Role of Italian Judges in Asylum Policy Implementation

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article aims to open the black box of the asylum determination process, focusing on asylum adjudication in courts and on actors implementing this specific policy frame: asylum judges. To assess the peculiarities of the Italian adjudication model and how judges concretely behave in shaping policy, we rely on the Street Level Bureaucracy (SLB) framework. The SLB perspective allows us to study the implementation of asylum adjudication from a bottom-up perspective, focusing on judges and their margin of discretion in processing asylum claims. This exploratory study aims to verify the proposed theoretical framework and to understand if courts and judges adopt a SLB behaviour, the reasons why they adopt such a behaviour and the scope of their discretion.