Diritti e produzione politica : a partire da Mario Stoppino

In a series of lectures on political production he gave at the University of Pavia in the middle of the 1990s Mario Stoppino sketched a general theory of political production that distinguishes between outputs, policies and outcomes and provides a taxonomy of all of them. According to such a theory, political production consists in the production of rights understood as “guaranteed powers”. This paper critically analyses Stoppino’s theory and suggests a possible reformulation of it. According to the proposed reformulation rights should be kept distinct from powers: rights are the outputs of political production, together with their guarantees and, sometimes, their fulfillment, whereas powers, as Stoppino understood them (i.e. as real opportunities), are the outcomes of political production. The paper suggests some revisions of Stoppino’s taxonomies of outputs, policies and outcomes. Finally Stoppino’s taxonomy of rights is compared to the well-known taxonomy by Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, and a new classification combining the insights of the two is advanced.