The “evidence turn” in the justice sector. Insights from the Albanian and Italian cases.

Over the last two decades, managerial and evidence turns increasingly and relentlessly reshaped the way of doing things and the ways things are framed and told in the justice sector. Legal professionalism played a dominant or almost absolute role in the sector until the early 1990s. Afterward judicial policy frames became deeply and widely output-oriented and the capacity to measure and assess with a sound objective and quantitative set of tools ranked first among the priorities of governments and judicial institutions embarked on a comprehensive reform agenda. This doctoral work addresses the differential patterns of plays and gains in the political arenas in two different countries. Unpublished insights and fresh data represent a sound empirical basis of the analysis herein provided. The thesis shows when, why and to what extent numbers can become issues of micro-politics or spaces of consensus-building. Numbers are a matter of choice. Nonetheless, they retain their strength in providing an azimuth for reformers and policy makers.