Western European constitutional courts in comparative perspective 1990-2020

Pócza, Kálmán and Csapodi, Márton and Dobos, Gábor and Gyulai, Attila (2024) Western European constitutional courts in comparative perspective 1990-2020. In: Constitutional Review in Western Europe. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 313-337. ISBN 9781032506623

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Abstract

While the JUDICON-EU research project formulated two aims (mapping the diversity and strength of judicial decisions), the results of the coding process present only one side of the story. The original data created by the project can answer the question to what extent judicial decisions constrained the room for manoeuvre of the legislation. Nevertheless, it is only one way to approach judicial-legislative relations by focusing on the constraint exerted by the courts on the legislatures. The other side of the story tells us which factors might have influenced courts and judges in taking strong or weak decisions. While there are several theoretical models which try to explain judicial behaviour and, indirectly, the strength of judicial decisions, here we will focus only on some selected models and summarize the main findings of the country studies in this respect. Keeping in mind these limitations, we will focus on three basic factors (institutional design, political context, event-related variables) which can explain judicial behaviour and ruling strength after presenting descriptive statistics on the diversity and strength of the courts’ decisions in Europe.

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