Is the Spanish Constitutional Court an instrument of the central government against the Autonomous Communities?

Abstract

This work applies various probit/logit models to a database constructed by the authors, consisting of rulings by the Spanish Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional, TC) resolving positive conflicts of competence between the Central Government and the Autonomous Communities from 1981 to 2014. Our goal is to contrast empirically whether the decisions of the Court respond strictly to legal criteria (the legalist or formalist viewpoint) or if they are determined by political motivations, so that we can state that the TC constitutes an extension, in the jurisdictional milieu, of the central executive power (the realist viewpoint). According to the results of our estimations, we can state that the approach which appears to predominate in the behaviour of the TC is the legalistic one.

The Italian Constitutional Court and the pendulum of regionalism

“…More recent research has investigated the behaviour of the Courts and of the judges in regionalised systems, such as Belgium, Spain and Italy itself (e.g. Dalla Pellegrina & Garoupa, 2013; Lopez-Laborda et al, 2018;Popelier, 2017). We contribute to this recent strand of studies and in particular to that addressing the in uence of the political and institutional environment over the behavior of the Courts.…”