Civil Service: What It Is and How It Works in Italy

What the civil service is

Per the Treccani encyclopedia, the civil service is at once an activity — running public affairs — and the set of bodies responsible for that function. It is not a single entity but a system spanning ministries and administrative agencies, public bodies, independent administrative authorities, state-owned enterprises, and local government such as regions, provinces and municipalities.

That structure is not accidental: it follows a precise constitutional framework, the same one that governs Italy’s constitutional bodies, even though the civil service, unlike those bodies, carries out the laws rather than writing or interpreting them.

How it’s structured, from the centre to the regions

Italy’s civil service operates on several levels. At the central level sit the ministries and state administrative agencies; at the local level, regions, provinces and municipalities manage their own functions under the autonomy principle set out in the Constitution.

Linking the two levels is the subsidiarity principle, set out in Article 118, paragraph 1, of the Constitution: administrative functions belong first to municipalities, moving up to provinces, metropolitan cities, regions or the state only when a unified approach is needed. Article 114, paragraph 2, of the Constitution defines municipalities, provinces, metropolitan cities and regions as autonomous bodies, each with its own statute, powers and functions under the principles the Constitution sets.

Direct and indirect administration

Running through this structure is a distinction based on the legal nature of the bodies involved. Ministerial bodies are state organs without their own legal personality: they act in the name of the state itself, which answers for them directly. Public bodies, by contrast, are autonomous public legal persons: they have a legal personality of their own, separate from the state’s, and answer for themselves even in court.

Practical example: a ministry office issuing a decree acts as the state in person, with no intermediate legal subject; a public body running a service, by contrast, can be sued as a party in its own right, because it has its own legal personality, separate from the state’s.

The constitutional principles

Article 97 of the Constitution, paragraph 2, requires that public offices be organized under legal provisions that ensure sound administration and impartiality: two criteria that apply to every public body, from a ministry down to a small municipality. The same article, paragraph 4, requires that public jobs be filled through a competitive exam, except where the law provides otherwise.

Article 98, paragraph 1, adds that public employees serve the Nation exclusively: not the government in office, and not a party. The Constitution does set specific limits, though — for instance, allowing the law to restrict party membership for judges, career military officers on active duty, police officers and diplomatic and consular representatives abroad. Article 97, paragraph 1, also ties sound administration to budget balance and the sustainability of public debt, in line with EU law under how the European Union works.

What it does in everyday life

Every time someone renews an ID card at a municipal office, files a claim with the social security agency INPS, or checks a region’s public data, they are dealing with the civil service. The legal rules that govern these services are applied by administrative bodies, in the everyday practice of offices, service counters and online portals.

Italy’s Ministry for the Civil Service, a department of the Prime Minister’s office, illustrates how this machinery gets modernized: a 2025 decree authorized more than 9,300 new hires and recruitments across public administrations.

Public personnel, by the numbers

ISTAT’s permanent census of public institutions, referring to 2022, counted 12,776 active public institutions in Italy, spread across roughly 104,000 work sites. Total personnel stood at 3,656,268, including the armed and police forces and public employees stationed abroad. Of these, 3,441,200 were employees in the strict sense (94.1% of the total) — 2,970,251 on permanent contracts and 470,949 on fixed-term contracts — while 215,068 were non-employee personnel (5.9%). Their national collective contracts are negotiated by ARAN, the agency that represents public administrations at the bargaining table.

These are figures from a single point in time, the 2022 survey, and should not be read as valid for every year that follows.