This article argues that constitutional courts in Western European parliamentary systems should be integrated into discussions of how public policies are changed, rather than being viewed as an external veto point. It attempts to bridge a gap between a judicial politics literature that focuses on the micro-level of individual judges' votes and comparative scholarship that operates at the macro-level. A model for viewing constitutional courts as veto players, as a third institutional actor, is proposed and is then illustrated using the cases of legalizing divorce and blocking the executive reissuing decree laws in Italy. The model considers both the indirect and direct influences that constitutional courts can exert on the policy-making process. It also facilitates understanding and explaining the role of courts, as well as legislatures and executives, in conducting the interactions and bargaining that result in policy change.

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Scholars have identified a number of societal features that contribute to the support of human rights. Controlling for the most prominent of these factors, we examine the degree to which judicial independence (JI) exerts an autonomous positive effect on human rights. We use a cross-sectional design, drawing on data for the 27 European Union members and its four prospective members, in conjunction with ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. We find that multiple indices of JI based on expert judgment, which include institutional but predominantly behavioral measures, reveal JI producing the most powerful positive effect in the support of human rights among the variables included in the analysis. Multiple measures of JI based on public surveys of the trustworthiness of a society's judicial institutions exert a positive, but not statistically significant, effect on support of human rights. Indeed, these latter effects are eclipsed by the relative equality of a society's national executive and legislature and its GDP/capita. Surprisingly, judicial review exerts no statistically significant effect on human rights protection, counter to the conventional wisdom that has driven so many constitutional designers in the post-World War II era. Our findings suggest that, while an independent judiciary holds the greatest potential for protecting human rights, constitutional drafters should focus less on institutional elements related to judicial independence and judicial review. Rather, those crafting constitutions intended to protect human rights should look to dispersing government power by enhancing electoral competitiveness and fostering judicial independence.Scholars attribute support for human rights protections to a number of factors including democracy, judicial independence, judicial review, economic development, and population size and diversity. In this article, we examine the independent effect of judicial independence while controlling for these other variables. Because of the variations that exist in designs of