Institutional Friction in High Court Policy Agendas: Comparing France, Canada and Germany

High courts are usually perceived as important players in democratic political systems in the age of Judicialisation. Existing publications use two approaches: Either, authors who have a quantitative approach apply legal categories or entirely ignore policy content. Or, authors who are interested in policy outcomes usually focus on singular decisions or specific policy areas but ignore the general pattern. However, we know little about the high court agendas from a public policy point of view – which is however, important to see if we want to know if Judicialisation is equally present in all policy fields. This paper compares the dynamic of issue attention for three high courts from 1979 to 2010: the German Bundesverfassungsgericht, the French Conseil constitutionnel and the Canadian Supreme Court. In order to analyse this dynamic we have coded the decisions by the three courts according to the policy content based on the Comparative Policy Agenda framework. Our research question is how the policy agenda of the three courts changed over time and if we find similar or dissimilar attention shifts across policy areas for all three courts. We argue that degree of institutional friction in order to be heard by the court varies between countries, being highest in Canada and lowest in France. We also find variation over time due to institutional reforms of the courts.