Are Advocates General Political? Policy Preferences of EU Member State Governments and the Voting Behavior of Members of the European Court of Justice

Frankenreiter, Jens

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2778803

Cited by 7 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…The rare studies that have explicitly sought to assess the impact of ideology on the EU bench have focused on the integration dimension but largely ignored the left-right dimension (Frankenreiter, 2017, 2018; Malecki, 2012). This prioritisation of the integration dimension, while common in the EU judicial politics literature, stands in sharp contrast to research on other EU institutions, where it is widely recognised that decision making is shaped by preferences along both the integration and the left-right dimension (Hix et al., 2006; Zimmer et al., 2005).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Judicial ideology in economic cases: Evidence from the General Court of the European Union

Wijtvliet

Dyèvre

2020

European Union Politics

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We contribute new empirical evidence on the influence of ideology on the behaviour of European Union judges. As votes and other common proxies for judicial preferences are unavailable, we ask 46 competition law experts to rate the ideology of 51 judges who have served on the General Court of the European Union. The average ratings are then used to explain the outcome of competition and state aid cases (N = 655). We find that, consistent with research on United States courts, the pro-business score of the panel median is a significant predictor of General Court decisions in competition and state aid cases. We find less conclusive evidence for the influence of Europhilia. While showing that attitudes towards private business may matter more than Europhilia in economic cases, our analysis also suggests that expert ratings constitute a viable and promising alternative in settings where other measurement methods are unavailable.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Judicial ideology in economic cases: Evidence from the General Court of the European Union

Wijtvliet

Dyèvre

2020

European Union Politics

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“…Many studies use the Supreme Court Database, which contains manually collected and expertly-coded data on the US Supreme Court's behaviour of the last two hundred years (Katz et al 2017). A large amount of these studies analyse the relationship between gender or political background of judges and their decision-making (see Epstein et al 2013;Rachlinski and Wistrich 2017;Frankenreiter 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A growing body of papers present results of more sophisticated statistical analyses, including regression analysis of case law (see Dhami and Belton 2016). Most of these papers focus on case law from the USA (see Chien 2011;Epstein et al 2013), but researchers outside of the USA have conducted such analyses as well (Holá et al 2012;Behn and Langford 2017;Bricker 2017;van Dijck 2018;Zhang et al 2017;Frankenreiter 2017aFrankenreiter , 2018.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Using machine learning to predict decisions of the European Court of Human Rights

2019

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When courts started publishing judgements, big data analysis (i.e. large-scale statistical analysis of case law and machine learning) within the legal domain became possible. By taking data from the European Court of Human Rights as an example, we investigate how natural language processing tools can be used to analyse texts of the court proceedings in order to automatically predict (future) judicial decisions. With an average accuracy of 75% in predicting the violation of 9 articles of the European Convention on Human Rights our (relatively simple) approach highlights the potential of machine learning approaches in the legal domain. We show, however, that predicting decisions for future cases based on the cases from the past negatively impacts performance (average accuracy range from 58 to 68%). Furthermore, we demonstrate that we can achieve a relatively high classification performance (average accuracy of 65%) when predicting outcomes based only on the surnames of the judges that try the case.

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“…The primary empirical challenge to studying big-picture questions about the development of EU law is a lack of comprehensive data on the network of EU legal instruments that scholars can use to establish stylized facts and test theory. Recently, there have been a number of important data-collection efforts related to EU law, but these efforts, while overlapping in some cases, are largely uncoordinated (Carrubba and Gabel, 2015; Derlén and Lindholm, 2014; Frankenreiter, 2018; Häge, 2011; Hübner, 2016; Larsson and Naurin, 2016). This article addresses this challenge by introducing the EvoEU data set.…”

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confidence: 99%

The evolution of European Union law: A new data set on the Acquis Communautaire

Fjelstul

2019

European Union Politics

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The European Union legal system is one of the most complex and sophisticated in the world. This article models the Acquis Communautaire (i.e. the corpus of European Union law) as a network and introduces the Evolution of European Union Law data set, which tracks connections between European Union primary law, European Union secondary law, European Union case law, national case law that applies European Union law, and national law that implements European Union law. It is the largest, most comprehensive data set on European Union law to date. It covers the entire history of the European Union , contains over 365,000 documents, and records over 900,000 connections between them. Legislative and judicial scholars can use this data set to study legislative override of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the implementation of European Union law, and other important topics. As an illustration, I use the data set to provide empirical evidence consistent with legislative override.

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Are Advocates General Political? Policy Preferences of EU Member State Governments and the Voting Behavior of Members of the European Court of Justice

Cited by 7 publications

References 23 publications

Judicial ideology in economic cases: Evidence from the General Court of the European Union

Judicial ideology in economic cases: Evidence from the General Court of the European Union

Using machine learning to predict decisions of the European Court of Human Rights

The evolution of European Union law: A new data set on the Acquis Communautaire

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