Judges on the Streets: Explaining Off-Bench Collective Mobilization by Judges Faced with Non-Existential Threats

What causes judges to break judicial norms of political neutrality and engage in off-bench resistance in the form of street protests? Existing literature typically assumes that this rare phenomenon arises only when judges experience direct and pervasive threats to judicial independence, often within a wider context of democratic backsliding, as seen in recent mobilizations in Poland, Romania, and Hungary. However, in Spain both in 2012 and 2025, judges used the frame of ‘threats to judicial independence’ to protest comparatively less significant issues (court fees and selection procedure of judges). We argue that studying this case, which lacks ‘extraordinary circumstances’ posed by an existential threat, enables us to isolate the causal mechanisms behind judges’ decisions to engage in transgressive behaviour. To that end we compare Spain with Portugal; the two are well-suited as contrasting case studies given their similar history and institutional system. When faced with a similarly non-existential threat in 2011 (pay cuts due to austerity measures), judges in Portugal chose a more technocratic, judicial route and contested the reform via claims in national courts and eventually, the ECJ (known as the Portuguese Judges case). To explain Spain’s extraordinary mobilization, we assess how two factors – political partisanship and social network theory – generated different judicial cultures around what constitutes legitimate judicial resistance to government measures. We use a mixed-methods design aimed at process-tracing, including elite interviews with judges in both countries, documentary evidence including court submissions, and analysis of cross-country surveys on trust and attitudes towards the judiciary. The paper contributes to understandings of how judicial behaviour is shaped by allyship with other power holders in society, and how judges can behave as political actors even in technocratic legal systems in democracies.