The Electoral Connection: How the Pivotal Judge Affects Oppositional Success at European Constitutional Courts

Constitutional Judicial Behavior: Exploring the Determinants of the Decisions of the French Constitutional Council

“…Similar studies have been conducted for European Constitutional Courts, i.e. in civil law countries, and have tended to support a similar conclusion: Justices are less likely to strike down laws passed by the party that appointed them (Amaral-Garcia et al (2009), Garoupa et al (2011), Hoennige (2009). More globally, these studies have contributed to validating the attitudinal theory, which claims that Justices are motivated not only by legal concerns, but also by political and ideological matters.…”

Quantitative Analysis of Judicial Voting

“…It has also been used in other contexts including German and French courts (Honnige 2009), Norway's Supreme Court (Skiple, Grendstad, Shaffer and Waltenburg 2016), the US, UK, Canada and Australia (Alarie and Green 2017) and Portugal (Amaral-Garcia et al 2009) Using the party of the appointer has some difficulties. Not all those who are in the same party have the same preferences -or even consistent preferences across areas of law -so we cannot assume all judges appointed by these parties have the same preferences (Epstein, Landes and Posner 2013;Epstein et al (forthcoming)).…”

Judicial Disagreement need not be Political: Dissent on the Estonian Supreme Court

“…This view is most prevalent in the United States, where "the issue of what drives judges is largely settled" (Helmke and Sanders, 2006, 867), and where sets of measurements of judicial preferences along the left-right dimension (Martin and Quinn, 2002) are to judicial politics what estimates of policy positions from manifestos are to the study of party politics. However, the claim that judges are policy-seekers with respect to the left-right dimension has also been made for judges on the French Conseil Constitutionnel and German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Hönnige, 2009), the Italian Corte Costituzionale (Dalla Pellegrina and Garoupa, 2013), and the Spanish and Portuguese Constitutional Tribunals (Hanretty, 2012). The claim that judges are policy-seekers with respect to other dimensions, in particular the centre-periphery dimension, has also been made for the European Court of Justice (Malecki, 2012) and the European Court of Human Rights (Voeten, 2008).…”

“…Estonia inherited a socialist legal system, and has gradually been moving towards, or perhaps returning to, a German-inspired legal system based around extensive definition of terms (Luts, 2001). To the extent that such a legal system might be thought antithetical to political judging (and Hönnige (2009) suggests it is not), we might expect either such low levels of dissent as to make impossible the drawing of reliable inferences concerning judges' ideal points, or the confining of such disagreement as exists to minor matters.…”

“…Concerning outcomes, Hönnige (2009) (1) across all appointments or only over distal appointments (Krehbiel, 2007); and (2) …”