Perceived Activism: How the CJEU is Portrayed in the Media

One of the most polarized debates in research on the CJEU is whether it is an (inappropriately) activist court. While the scholarly debate tries to find different ways to analyze whether the CJEU is an activist court, this paper asks whether the CJEU is perceived and portrayed as an activist court in the media. Since courts’ authority strongly relies on their perception as neutral agents of the law, analyzing perceptions and portrayals of the Court seems at least as important as trying to assess whether this perception is objectively right or wrong. To do so, the Paper systematically collects national newspaper articles mentioning the CJEU from national archives to assess whether these mentions are favorable, neutral, or critical of the CJEU. Specifically, it compares portrayals in the German and British press. Assessing these patterns over time can tell us whether the increasing political relevance of the Court has also led to an increasing attention for CJEU by the media. Furthermore, it allows for an assessment of whether this attention has been favorable, neutral or critical of the Court’s decisions and of the Court as an institution. The paper’s comparative design allows for an assessment of the impact of newspaper’s ideological orientation, of the degree of euroskepticism, and of a country’s general culture of portraying court decisions in political news coverage.