Judges at the frontline in Italy and France: unveiling discretion in asylum appeals through the lens of the street-level bureaucracy

In the intricate realm of public administration, the Street-Level Bureaucracy (SLB) framework has become an influential lens in sociology, public administration, and organizational studies. Despite its wide application, the judicial sector has remained underexplored by the Street-Level Bureaucracy research. This dissertation aims to address this gap by investigating the work of judges as Street-Level Bureaucrats (SLBs). With this aim, the research focuses on the timely domain of asylum policy, grasping the concrete implementation of asylum determination at the appeal stage. In this regard, it investigates asylum judges’ uses of discretion on the ground in the encounters with asylum seekers and in the decision-making process. Moreover, it highlights the sources of influence on judges’ discretion at the street-level considering individual, organizational, and system factors. To this end, the dissertation adopts a comparative approach focusing on asylum appeals in Italy and France. In the two countries, data have been collected using qualitative methods, and, more precisely, through observation of asylum hearings, semi-structured interviews, and shadowing with asylum judges. Findings, elucidating judges’ work at the frontline of asylum adjudication, show that these professionals behave in a way that is familiar to most street-level bureaucrats, adopting patterns of practices and behavioral efforts to deal with the challenging task of putting into action asylum law. In doing so, they often move towards or away from the asylum seekers, shaping the concrete implementation of asylum determination. The comparison between Italy and France reveals the influences and connections of individual and contextual factors – such as available resources, organizational and institutional arrangements, and professional norms – in shaping the extent and use of discretion.