The Politics of Judicial Governance in Europe

Current European countries regist a wide varieaty of approaches to the governance of the judiciary. The Judicial Council model, in which a separate organ concentrates powers over the judicial branch, seems to have become a continental 'best practice'. However, this model coexists with the Courts' Service model, which prevails in some of the most advanced democracies in the continent, and with the Ministry of Justice model, which has managed to survive in a number of countries. This paper explores the legal and political determinants of the option for each of these approaches to judicial governance in European political systems. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, it will be showed that these choices are the result of the interaction among conditions such as dynamics of institutional diffusion within legal families, existence of authoritarian legacies that need to be overcome, and the emergence of trends and soft-standards over time, including those related to Europeanization.