In this paper, the role and position of the Belgian Constitutional Court (CC) is analysed in order to show how it interferes with politics. In establishing constitutional courts, legislators can pursue multiple objectives. Initially, the CC’s role was limited to upholding the complex political agreements that characterize Belgium’s consociational system. During the last decades, the CC developed into a venue for deliberation, with extended accessibility and a wide set of reference norms. The expectations of the legislator, namely the court as protector of existing political agreements might conflict with its deliberative ideals. Empirically, we will demonstrate and analyse the nature of this tension. We will use a dataset consisting of all CC rulings between 1985 to 2013 (n=4000). More concretely, we will investigate the CC’s cases by looking at the type of plaintiff and defendant, subject of legislation, composition of the court, reference norms, structure and content of the reasoning.
