Institutionally grounded judicial research seeks to conceptualize courts and their decision-making as part of a larger political system (Maveety 2003). The political system is based on mutual controls of the three branches of government: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, specifically the constitutional court. Kelsen’s model of a dedicated constitutional court is a European model (Stone Sweet 2002). The constitutional court has the capacity to influence parliamentary governance and to control policy outcomes through constitutional review. Constitutional judges govern with ministers and parliamentarians and hence, according to Kelsen, they are ‘negative legislators’ (cited in Stone Sweet 2002: 81).
In this paper, the relations between the constitutional court, the executive and the legislature are examined in the context of (inter-)institutional accountability. Institutional accountability means that office-holders are responsible to other institutional actors who have the expertise and legal authority to control and sanction their behaviour (Morlino and Diamond 2005). In addition, it is vital that there is judicial independence (Guarnieri and Piana 2011).This paper will examine constitutional review and institutional accountability in a new democracy - Poland. It will focus on the period 1989-2011. By presenting a diachronic comparison of different constitutional settings in this period, an increasing importance of the constitutional court in policy-making will be demonstrated.
