Judicial Constraints on Legislations in Central Europe: A Time-Series Cross-National Analysis

Judicial decisions of the Constitutional Courts in Central Europe have been subject of several outstanding analyses. These investigations have, however, most of the time focused on some selected decisions of the courts and missed a coherent approach to the judicial decisions. Since the JUDICON project elaborated a methodology which facilitated to measure the strength of the judicial decisions in a highly coherent way this paper will draw on the database produced by the research team. The dataset contains all relevant decisions of the constitutional courts of Albania, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Romania. We started to evaluate the data by applying the external strategic model of judicial behavior on the relevant court decisions which concerned legislative acts from 1990 (1993) to 2015. According to the literature, public trust in courts and political fragmentation are the two most important factors which help explain the behavior of the judges of the constitutional courts. However, we have tested additional factors, such as political polarization (by using Eurobarometer data), judicial independence (as estimated by Linzer and Staton (2015)), and constitutional flexibility (by determining the existence of a constitutional majority) for every single cabinet in the selected seven countries from 1990 to 2015. Thus, we looked for which of these factors might have considerably influenced judicial behavior in Central Europe. Though large-n studies have certainly several virtues, we started to evaluate the database also qualitatively with country experts, who will help us in evaluation by producing case studies on selected Central European countries.