Reaching Out to the Public: Legitimation Efforts and Strategic Communication by the CJEU – Evidence from Press Release Data

International and supranational institutions face increasing pressure to legitimate their actions. Demands for justification and legitimation have increased along the growing competences and authority of these institutions, and the politicization of their powers and how these affect society. International courts (ICs) are no different in that regard. Even though judges and courts are not directly accountable to voters, they engage in public communication with help of press releases and social media. Questions of legitimacy, transparency and politicization have been particularly prominent in studies of European Politics and EU institutions. However, the public perception as well as public communication of the Union’s highest court as the most powerful IC has remained a blind spot. This paper addresses this gap by asking under which conditions the CJEU issues press releases. We argue that there are several incentives for (international) courts to engage in public communications: compliance, public support, demand for transparency and legitimacy. Meanwhile, we neither know anything about the frequency and patterns of ICs’ external communications, nor about the underlying mechanisms or reasons. Public relations efforts might help the Court in promoting decisions that support a certain agenda. We hypothesize that the Court purposefully disseminates information about certain judgments that help it promote an integrationist agenda and to ensure compliance. In order to test this empirically, we investigate patterns of external communications with help of original press release data for CJEU cases decided between 1997 and 2012. The paper uses a dataset on CJEU preliminary reference procedures and employs the Court’s press releases as dependent variable in a regression design. We show that the Court does not only promote legally important cases but also seems to strategically tailor its public relations efforts towards politically conflictual decisions, i.e. decisions for which compliance is hard to ensure. Most notably, the more member state governments that voice a position against further integration and in favour of preserved national sovereignty, the more likely it is that the Court issues a press release. The results suggest that the Court’s concern with compliance surfaces in its public communication. By contrast, we find no support for the Court strategically using the instrument of press releases to advance a pro-European integration agenda.