My courts are worse than yours? Citizens benchmarking of judicial systems and its impact on public support for EU interventions on Rule of Law

Member States’ courts played an important role in the process of legal integration by enforcing rights derived from EU law. However, the EU is recently struggling to make Member States engage in respecting the rule of law, which is considered crucial for the correct and uniform application of EU law. In this regard, governments in Eastern Europe, like Fidez and PiS, had increasingly attacked the rule of law and narrowed independence of their judiciaries. As a result, the EU reacted to contain illiberal practices and democratic backsliding by relying on diverse political and legal instruments. This intervention is being framed by populist parties to public opinion as an illegitimate intrusion of their sovereignty interfering with the will of the people that they represent. Hence, these measures might create unrest and become ineffective if EU institutions do not confront the necessity of earning public support in those countries, which substantiates the power of populist governments. In this paper, we explore the relevance of citizens’ comparative benchmarking for perceiving the intervention of the EU as legitimate. In line with benchmarking theory, support emerges as an individual and a contextual moderator: citizens are comparatively more supportive of EU intervention when they perceived their national judicial systems to perform worse than in other European countries.