Crowdsourcing the Attitudinal Model: Judicial Behavior of General Court Judges in EU Competition Law Cases

The attitudinal model is commonly used as a first and solid step into the research of judicial behavior. The application of the attitudinal model in the context of the Court of Justice of the EU is still in its infancy and lacks a valid exogenous measurement for judicial ideology. The current research tries to fill this void by constructing a proxy for judicial preferences of General Court judges in the field of EU competition law. Much US research involving exogenous measurement of judicial preferences is based on the coding of newspaper editorials about candidate Supreme Court justices, in effect relying on the input of experts familiar with these aspiring judges. EU judges are publicly less well-known than their American peers, which necessitates capturing expert perceptions of judges in a different manner. Consequently, the paper introduces an expert crowdsourcing design that generates input from experts on judicial preferences. 46 internationally recognized EU competition law experts familiar with General Court judges evaluate these judges on their legal knowledge and attitudes towards the business community and European integration. The results include more than 5.000 data points relating to preferences of 51 different judges. The paper scores General Court judges on the dimensions of perceived legal knowledge, perceived preferences for governmental intervention in the market, and perceived preferences for European integration. It also discusses the design of the study and the treatment of raw data. The crowdsourcing initiative subsequently allows me to bring the proffered judicial scores to bear on the voting behavior of General Court judges in competition law and state aid cases. In doing is, it becomes possible to test both the validity of expert perception as a proxy for judicial ideology and the viability of the attitudinal model as an explanation for judicial behavior of General Court judges.