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It remains unclear what institutional characteristics determine the publication of press releases by constitutional courts. Research has revealed that courts use press releases to disseminate information; however, little is known about when exactly courts choose to publish a press release on a ruling. By focusing on institutional elements, this study argues that press releases form a part of judicial public relations and are used to enhance openness and transparency surrounding specific court rulings. This argument is tested empirically via a novel dataset on the activities of the German Federal Constitutional Court. Based on 1131 senate rulings decided between 1996 and 2018, this study demonstrates that proceeding types and changes to the status quo are the main characteristics that determine the publication of court press releases, whereas intra-judicial and internal conflicts are revealed to be less influential.

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As the COVID-19 pandemic motivated a shift to virtual teaching, exams have increasingly moved online too. Detecting cheating through collusion is not easy when tech-savvy students take online exams at home and on their own devices. Such online at-home exams may tempt students to collude and share materials and answers. However, online exams’ digital output also enables computer-aided detection of collusion patterns. This paper presents two simple data-driven techniques to analyze exam event logs and essay-form answers. Based on examples from exams in social sciences, we show that such analyses can reveal patterns of student collusion. We suggest using these patterns to quantify the degree of collusion. Finally, we summarize a set of lessons learned about designing and analyzing online exams.

Brexit has been the most important issue in British politics in recent years. Whereas extra-parliamentary actors dominated the run-up to the 2016 referendum, the issue moved back to Parliament after the vote. This paper analyses newspaper reporting on Brexit in major British outlets during the post-referendum phase from July 2017 to March 2019. We study the visibility of Members of Parliament to assess whether the debate was balanced between parties and individual MPs relative to their vote and seat share. We conduct an automated text analysis of 58,247 online and offline newspaper articles covering the ideological spectrum from left to right, and from pro-Brexit to anti-Brexit. Our main findings are: (1) Conservative politicians dominated the debate, and (2) organized pro-Brexit MP pressure groups such as 'Leave Means Leave' were disproportionally more visible. This means that reporting was biased towards Conservative MPs and within the Conservative Party towards supporters of a hard Brexit. These findings are remarkably stable across different types of newspapers. The results challenge previous analyses that found a higher degree of balance in reporting but corroborate recent studies on the tonality of Brexit reporting that found a pro-Brexit bias.

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Judicial diplomacy describes the courts’ efforts to promote liberal democracy and protect their institutional authority. Bilateral court meetings are essential for judicial diplomacy, encompassing jurisprudential (e.g., discussion of case law) and aims of strategic (e.g., maximising influence). This study presents a novel approach to assess such meetings. It analyses the German Federal Constitutional Court meeting reports between 1998–2019, using content and semantic network analysis. The content analysis shows that court meetings focus on jurisprudential aspects; however, strategic considerations also play a role in discussions with interlocutors from emerging democracies. These findings are substantiated by the semantic network analysis, which discloses that recent case law, Europeanisation, and globalisation are the main issues discussed. Hence, this study presents an analysis of a novel data source. Further, it contributes to judicial politics research as transnational court meetings could be a missing link to understand legal citation networks.

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