Suchergebnisse

Understanding how high courts successfully constrain the state poses a puzzle central to the study of constitutional review. An increasingly popular answer to this puzzle is that voters electorally punish governments for noncompliance with judicial decisions. This article conducts a cross-national analysis of the relationship between noncompliance and an incumbent government's electoral success. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy Project on noncompliance with the national high courts of 74 countries from 2007 to 2017, I examine whether voters systematically punish or reward noncompliance. The analysis of a series of hierarchical linear models reveals that engaging in more noncompliance decreases an incumbent government's vote share in contexts with a strong pre-existing norm of compliance. This result is robust to both the inclusion of potential confounding variables and alternative model specifications.

AbstractScholars have long debated the positive and negative consequences of an aware public for the quality of governance in modern liberal democracies. This article extends this debate to the context of constitutional review by exploring how public awareness can limit the effective exercise of review by courts lacking strong public support. Incorporating aspects of both the legitimacy and separation of powers theories on judicial power, the author argues that public awareness weakens the efficacy of such unpopular courts by creating an electoral incentive for governments to defy adverse rulings, even when doing so may lead to punishment from other institutional stakeholders. The article develops a simple formal model that identifies how and under what conditions public awareness can influence an unpopular court's decision making. An analysis of rulings issued by the Court of Justice of the European Union finds support for the model's empirical implications.

AbstractModern liberal democracies typically depend on courts with the power of constitutional review to ensure that elected officials do not breach their constitutional obligations. The efficacy of this review, however, can depend on the public observing such breaches. One resource available to many of the world's constitutional courts to influence the public's ability to do so is public oral hearings. Drawing on the comparative judicial literature on separation of powers, public awareness, and noncompliance, I develop a formal model of public oral hearings. The model provides empirical implications for when a court will hold public oral hearings and how hearings correspond to a court's willingness to rule against elected officials. An empirical analysis of hearings at the German Constitutional Court supports the model's prediction that courts use hearings as a resource to address potential noncompliance.

AbstractExplanations for the successful expansion and consolidation of the European Union and its legal system have long emphasized the importance of domestic courts' sending preliminary references to the Court of Justice. Key to many of these theoretical accounts is the claim that domestic courts are better equipped than the Court of Justice to compel national governments to comply with EU law. Integrating insights from the comparative judicial politics literature into the context of the EU's preliminary references system, we provide a theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim by arguing that incorporating domestic courts into the EU legal process enhances public support for expansive judicial interpretations of EU law. We go on to argue, however, that this transfer of legitimacy depends on citizens' views of the national and European courts. We support our argument with evidence from a preregistered survey experiment fielded in Germany.

AbstractA growing body of research theorizes that partisanship can undermine democracy as citizens prioritize their political interests over abstract norms and values. We argue that crises might counteract intense partisanship by giving citizens clarity on the threats posed by rule of law violations. Examining the differential application of a law – a breach of democratic norms – we draw on an experiment embedded in representative surveys of Germany, the United States, Hungary and Poland to examine citizens' sense of appropriate punishment for elites' violation of a municipal mask‐wearing ordinance. We find evidence of partisan bias in citizens' willingness to support punishment in all four countries. But, in the two consolidated democracies, we find that concern about the Covid‐19 crisis diminishes partisan biases in punishment preferences: citizens who are most concerned about the crisis also model the most consistency in their willingness to hold copartisans into account.