Constitutional courts are expected to justify their rulings with a clear reason-giving. This justification is intended to stimulate compliance with the judgment and enhances the legitimacy of the court. To maximize clarity on this justification, courts may cite external authorities (for instance, international case law or preparatory parliamentary documents). While scholars in common law countries have studied the citation practice of their (Supreme) courts extensively, this field is relatively unexplored in continental Europe. Moreover, European legal scholars only rarely apply empirical methods for their research. This article aims to contribute to these theoretical and methodological challenges by analysing the citation practice of the Belgian Constitutional Court (BeCC). In particular, I aim to explore how the grounding of judgments has developed over time and which case-specific features might affect this practice. In addition, I hypothesize that increased case salience and/or the invalidation or modulation of challenged legislation pushes the amount of cited authorities (citation density) upwards. For this purpose, I developed a unique database containing relevant procedural and substantial information on all judgments of the CC since its inception (1983) until the most recent rulings from 2015 (n=3145). I combine this with data on how the news media reported on each ruling, considering media-coverage as a proxie for salience.
