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Media Attention against all odds, or Politicization as Usual? Introducing Case Salience Data for CJEU Cases

European Union
Media
Courts
Judicialisation
Julian Dederke
University of Zurich
Julian Dederke
University of Zurich

Abstract

When do newspapers report on judicial decisions? The question of issue salience and case salience data are prominent in the US literature on judicial politics. By contrast, data on newspaper coverage is not available for CJEU judgements so far. With the continued trend of judicialization of (supranational) politics in the EU, court decisions should increasingly receive public attention, particularly so with politically sensitive issues like welfare benefits and healthcare reaching the CJEU. The Paper provides insight into newly collected data on newspaper coverage of CJEU decisions in four EU countries. It links theoretical expectations about the politicization of judicial authority with empirical data on the salience and contestation of CJEU decisions in the public. With help of descriptive statistics and regression models the structure of the media coverage is revealed. It is shown, that the number of newspaper articles dealing with the Court in some countries increased relative to those reporting on all EU-related issues, while this ratio remained rather constant in other countries. Moreover, the salience and contestation of court decisions in newspapers varies depending on the standing of courts in the national political systems, case subject matters, the legal procedure, and the timing related to other salient topics. The paper also serves the purpose of mapping the conflict structure in the EU judicial politics space. Some cases that left a strong legal imprint on the Community legal order in fact seem to be ‘masked’ by the law and have not resulted in media coverage. More recently, however, newspapers seem to pay more attention to what is going on at court. Finally, the paper suggests opportunities to use the collected data in qualitative as well as quantitative analyses in the field of EU judicial politics, inspired by the application of case salience data in the US context.