Legislative-Judicial Relations in Central Europe

Abstract

Although over the last 20 years an increasing number of scientific articles and books with multi-faceted approaches have been published on the practice of constitutional adjudication, several methodological problems still prevail. The main deficiency of the systematic empirical research on constitutional adjudication consist in an unsophisticated dichotomous approach that separates the merely positive and negative decisions of constitutional courts, i.e. decisions that concluded in declaring the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of a given legislative act. A more sophisticated methodology has been elaborated by the JUDICON research group (www.judicon.tk.mta.hu). This new methodology facilitates mapping systematically the multi-faceted reality of constitutional adjudication and measuring the strength of judicial decisions. In order to fit the research to reality, a scale has been elaborated to measure the strength of judicial decisions. This scale seems to be an appropriate tool to answer the question: To what extent have decisions of constitutional courts constrained the legislative’s room for manoeuvre? Based on a dataset, which contains all relevant decisions of the constitutional courts of Central Europe, this panel will present first a comparative time-series cross-national analysis of the strength of judicial decisions along with some external factors (political fragmentation and polarization; judicial independence; constitutional flexibility) which might explain the variation of the strength of judicial decisions. Secondly three qualitative case studies will complement and to some extent modify the results of the large-n comparative study. Case studies on Germany, Romania and Slovakia will feature longitudinal changes (or consistency) of the position of the constitutional courts’ decisions; differences (and changes in differences) in the strength of judicial decisions vis-à-vis various parliamentary majorities; trends in judicial decisions within one parliamentary term; trends overarching several parliamentary terms and varying political circumstances; and assumed influences of changing political circumstances.