Are Judges Political Animals after All? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the German Federal Constitutional Court

Gschwend, Thomas; Sternberg, Sebastian; Zittlau, Steffen

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2738512

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…These rules let states influence the checks and balances in the deliberations. However, even when chamber assignments are left to the courts, they tend to produce more ideologically heterogeneous panels than what a random draw would indicate (Gschwend et al, 2016;Frankenreiter, 2018b).…”

Section: Allocations Are At the President's Discretionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building legitimacy: strategic case allocations in the Court of Justice of the European Union

Hermansen

2020

Journal of European Public Policy

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Does the President of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) make strategic use of his members? Cases in the CJEU are prepared by a "judge-rapporteur" who acts as an agenda setter. I argue that the President builds the Court's legitimacy by strategically allocating cases to select judges.Using original data on 9623 case allocations , I argue that suspicions about judges' political accountability can polarize already politicized debates. The President circumvents such dynamics by appointing a rapporteur whose government holds moderate political preferences. However, he considers governmental preferences and disagreements mainly when case law is not yet developed. This may also contribute to explaining judges' individual-level specialization, which arguably favors the construction of a coherent case law.

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Section: Allocations Are At the President's Discretionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building legitimacy: strategic case allocations in the Court of Justice of the European Union

Hermansen

2020

Journal of European Public Policy

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“…This call for datasets was expressly taken as an inspiration for creating the German Federal Courts Dataset (see Hamann 2017:n. 2; www.richter-im-internet.de/edition). Gschwend et al (2016) studied whether Constitutional Court judges are "political animals" by using random shocks to the bench composition as quasi-experiments: in cases where judges drop out from their respective division due to illness or other chance events, the rules of procedure require them to be replaced by judges from another division. By coding for both which judges actually signed decisions between 1998 and 2011 and which judges were responsible according to the original case allocation, Gschwend et al identified quasi-random variations that they interpreted as causal for the division's decision making.…”

Section: Literature: Case Allocation Plans In Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Swalve (2019) was the first to use the new dataset: he analyzed German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) decisions to find out how collegial decision making affects judicial deliberation. Using a similar identification strategy as Gschwend et al (2016), Swalve builds on anecdotal evidence that some court divisions occasionally face staff shortages and end up with newcomer or "outsider" judges stepping in to fill vacancies. These judges tend to be unfamiliar with the division's decision-making culture, so the study analyzes the effect that such quasi-random shocks had on the decision-making mode by which the division disposed of its case load (either unanimous court order or deliberated judgment).…”

Section: Literature: Case Allocation Plans In Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The German Federal Courts Dataset 1950–2019: From Paper Archives to Linked Open Data

Hamann¹

2019

J Empirical Legal Studies

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Various reasons explain why Europe lags behind the United States in empirical legal studies. One of them is a scarcity of available data on judicial decision making, even at the highest levels of adjudication. By institutional design, civil-law judges have lower personal profiles than their common-law counterparts. Hence very few empirical data are available on how courts are composed and how that composition changes over time. The present project remedies that by easing access to such data and lowering the threshold for empirical studies on judicial behavior. This paper introduces the German Federal Courts Dataset (GFCD) as a resource for empirical legal scholars, with the objective of inspiring more European lawyers to engage with empirical aspects of civil-law adjudication. To that end, several thousand pages of German court documentation were digitized, transcribed into machine-readable tables (ready to be imported into statistics software), and published online (www.richter-im-internet.de). To simultaneously explore innovative ways of sharing public-domain datasets, the data were modeled as linked open data and imported into the Wikidata repository for use in any computational application.

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Section: Literature: Case Allocation Plans In Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The German Federal Courts Dataset 195002018: From Paper Archives to Linked Open Data

Hamann

2018

SSRN Journal

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Are Judges Political Animals after All? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the German Federal Constitutional Court

Cited by 3 publications

References 14 publications

Building legitimacy: strategic case allocations in the Court of Justice of the European Union

Building legitimacy: strategic case allocations in the Court of Justice of the European Union

The German Federal Courts Dataset 1950–2019: From Paper Archives to Linked Open Data

The German Federal Courts Dataset 195002018: From Paper Archives to Linked Open Data

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