Constitutional Review in Non-Democracies: An Empirical Analysis of the Russian Constitutional Court, 1992-2018

Contrary to previous assumptions that constitutional courts are connected with the rule of law and democracies, today they function in non-democratic countries. In such regimes, courts are tolerated as long as they perform specific functions, ranging from protecting the property to attract investors or boosting regime’s legitimacy to sidelining opposition and implementing unpopular policies (Moustafa & Ginsburg 2008; Trochev 2008). Additionally, such courts are always under threats of court-packing, changes in the appointment procedures or rules of tenure. Thus, they have to constantly strike a balance between performing functions imposed by the ruler and trying not to lose the court's legitimacy completely. However, comparative judicial politics only recently has started to shift towards studies of courts in non-democracies – previous studies have mostly focused on the US and Western democracies, and lack of readily available data is one factor that courts in other parts of the world remained understudied. In this paper, I focus on one of such courts, the Russian Constitutional Court (RCC), between 1992 and 2018. My empirical analysis is based on a novel self-collected database of all final judgments issued by the RCC for this period (N = 588), enriched with year-level indicators of democratisation, freedom of media, economic development, and others. I proceed in three parts – first, by explaining how the data was collected and coded, followed up by one part of my empirical analysis, and conclude with summarising challenges that arose during my data collection and whether they are field- or country- specific. As for the analysis, I will present my findings in regards to one question: given time-constraints and workload, but also higher personal and professional risks, why and when do judges at higher courts in non-democracies author dissenting opinions? Using OLS and logistic regressions, I will show which factors increase (or decrease) the likelihoods of authoring dissenting opinions for judges at the Russian Constitutional Court.