Abstract judicial review is one of the main rights of minority parties in European countries with a centralized constitutional court. In the legislative process, abstract judicial review is a special oppositional mean to counteract laws by the parliamentary majority. This procedure was distributed only scarcely before 1990, and by now has become common in all new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe.
The paper investigates under which circumstances and to what extent opposition parties in national legislatures can make use of abstract judicial review of government legislation. The goal is to explain the cross-national variation of the number of abstract judicial reviews. We consider the time period from 2000-2010, using a cross-sectional analysis of 17 European countries. We hypothesize that the most important determinants of opposition use of judicial review are: (1) the institutional rules, i.e. who has the right to seek abstract judicial review and what the necessary quorum is to do so; (2) the actual size of the parliamentary minority, even when a sufficient quorum is fulfilled, along with (3) whether or not the legislative minority parties are distributed en bloc on the left-right axis; this is because when the opposition includes parties aligned very differently on the political spectrum, those parties will most likely be either unable or unwilling to cooperate; (4) in countries with a symmetric second chamber, one can expect that whether the national government also has a majority in the upper house will affect oppositional use oft he right to seek judicial review.
