Many scholars have asserted that in democratic countries where one party dominates the political sphere and has the power to restrain the jurisdiction, the likelihood of judges deciding against the government will diminish. Although the underlying logic of this argument is quite appealing, it does not explain why in certain cases the judges ignore possible political retaliations and give anti-government decisions. Arguing that the preferences and strategic calculations of judges are in interaction, the goal of this study is to account for whether -and if so- how the court’s preferences moderate the impact of political fragmentation on the court’s invalidation of laws. The theoretical framework of this study posits that court’s preferences can attenuate the effect of political fragmentation by shaping judges’ responses even under a politically risky environment. To account for this implication, I take the behavior of and preferences of the judges as a whole and analyze the Turkish Constitutional Court’s decisions taken between the years 1984 and 2010. The empirical findings of this study show that while the Court’s political preferences vastly attenuate the impact of political fragmentation on judicial behavior, its legal preferences have trivial moderating effect. Even though this research focuses on the Turkish Constitutional Court, the proposed model is potentially applicable to other developing democracies.
