The German Constitutional Court: A Case Study

The proposal focuses on judicial decisions by the German Constitutional Court in the last 25 years. It serves the purpose of evaluating the relationship between the legislative power and constitutional courts in democracies by means of a case study which is part of the JUDICON project. Building on the »index of strength« (developed by JUDICON), the German case study aims to analyse the following two basic questions: Are there major trends in the strength of decisions discernible during the period from 1990 to 2015? And what are the ruptures or critical periods in which the patterns of (majority) decisions have been changed? The first rounds of data analyses reveal a considerably coherent pattern of decisions – and by that reinforcing the image of the BVerfG as powerful constitutional court. Moreover, the index also allows for a better understanding of the court’s different techniques to engage into the motions brought before the bench by discerning various periods of »judicial activism« and »judicial restraint«. While the data show, structurally speaking, a clear correlation between the number and the strength of rulings in general, there are notacible exceptions – years with considerably less (in number), but strong (in strength) rulings. Most of these rulings can be attributed to the challenges of the German reunification. While the proposed study (PS) wants to present and elaborate on these findings, its aim is also directed to the explanatory field of research – in a three-folded way: (1) Changes in government: Courts can be seen as political actors depending to a large extent on the power distribution within the political arena. The PS operationalizes the criteria of this approach by analyzing the fragmentation of the political system and of the political party system. (2) Changes in public opinion: In a similar vein courts can also be seen as political actors depending to a large extend on public support. The PS aims to operationalize the impact of the public opinion by using accessible data sets of public trust in the in German political institution and content analysis of newspaper articles. (3) Changes in the composition of the court: The court’s decisions may also be structured by the internal composition of the bench. First insights can be drawn from the dissenting opinions which give some clues about possible alliances among the judges and their decisions. In addition, the PS analyzes the influence of the nomination by the political parties on the individual voting behavior of each judge based on theoretical assumptions of the attitudinal model. Taken together, the set of variables provides for a genuine political science research perspective and it contributes to or even challenges the narratives of the legal community on what counts as the most political important decisions of the court.