Media Attention Against All Odds, or Politicisation as Usual? Introducing Case Salience Data for CJEU Cases

When do newspapers report on judicial decisions? The topic of court-society interactions and case salience data are prominent in the literature on various courts, in particular the United States Supreme Court. By contrast, data on newspaper coverage is not available for CJEU judgements so far. However, 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 more than 1500 CJEU decisions in six EU countries. It links theoretical expectations about the politicization of judicial authority with empirical data on the salience of CJEU decisions in the public. The salience and contestation of court decisions in newspapers should vary 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. Also the CJEU’s efforts to disseminate information about its judgements seem to influence media attention. While in some countries the number of newspaper articles dealing with the Court increased relative to all articles reporting on EU-related issues, this ratio remained rather constant in other countries. Correlating different salience measures used in the judicial politics literature reveals that 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. The paper highlights the relevance of these findings for questions of legitimacy, accountability and policy impact of the CJEU. 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.