CJEU judgments in the news – capturing the public salience of decisions of the EU’s highest court

Abstract

Case salience data are prominent in the US judicial politics literature. By contrast, such data is not available for most other courts. With the continued judicialization of politics in the EU and the CJEU's growing importance, court decisions could increasingly receive public attention. Inspired by US case salience data this paper provides insight into new data on newspaper coverage of 4,357 CJEU decisions in eight EU broadsheets. Asking under which conditions newspapers report on judicial decisions, the article links theoretical expectations about the public salience of court decisions with empirical data on CJEU case salience. Multilevel regression models show that the salience of CJEU decisions varies depending on the standing of courts in national political systems, case characteristics, inter-institutional conflict, and the Court's public relations activities. These findings have implications for the perception and communication of the CJEU and provide initial insights into media attention for hundreds of CJEU cases.

Avoiding Public Backlash: Enforcing Rule of Law in the European Union

“…The experiment is vignette-based with a relatively small number of conditions (hence, not conjoint). The experiment asks about the real-world ongoing (as of July 2022) enforcement actions that are relatively salient relative to the low amount of news that the CJEU and its actions typically get at the national level (Dederke, 2022). In comparison to an approach with fictitious scenarios or a conjoint setup, our approach enables us to say whether the changes induced by the informational vignettes are enough to overturn existing attitudes about a real-world event or not.…”

Leveling and Spotlighting: How International Courts Refract Private Litigation to Build Institutional Legitimacy

“…Yet no IC can escape political contestation for long, particularly in a climate of cross-national backlash to globalization and judicialization (Blauberger and Martinsen, 2020;Walter, 2021;Voeten, 2022). Instead, recent research has illuminated that some new-style ICs adopt public relations campaigns to cultivate support (Caserta and Cebulak, 2021;Dederke, 2022). These efforts usually target compliance constituencies: interest groups and civil society actors who serve as transmission belts for ICs into domestic politics by raising awareness, amplifying their rulings, and supporting their authority (Voeten, 2013;Alter and Helfer, 2013;Pavone, 2019).…”

“…In particular, IC judgements are amplified when legal practitionerslawyers, legal scholars, and judges -learn of new rights claims from commentaries in law reviews and spearhead litigation campaigns to entrench these new entitlements (Stein, 1981;Weiler, 1994;Alter, 2014). ICs can shape coverage in law reviews by manipulating procedural rules -such as allocating larger chamber formations -and issuing press releases to spotlight cases where they support individual rights claims (Dederke, 2022;Krehbiel, 2016). When national legal communities pick up and amplify these cases, ICs are well on their way towards building a reservoir of public support.…”

“…To assess our revisionist theory, we scrutinize the first IC to provide access to private parties, a court that has grown into a uniquely influential international judicial policymaker: the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Although scholars agree that private litigation has fueled the ECJ's institutional development, they disagree about whether the ECJ has primarily favored individuals or businesses (Conant, 2002;Börzel, 2006;Cichowski, 2007;Conant et al, 2018), and whether it has proceeded by stealth or by public advocacy (Stein, 1981;Burley and Mattli, 1993;Dederke, 2022;Blauberger and Martinsen, 2020). Triangulating between the public writings and outreach of ECJ judges and a novel dataset of nearly 7,000 cases involving private litigants referred to the ECJ by national courts, we find compelling evidence that the ECJ both "levels" and "spotlights."…”

Sovereignty, Substance, and Public Support for European Courts’ Human Rights Rulings

“…Similarly, some scholars suggest that the CJEU has started to exercise more restraint in policy areas where both the public and member state governments are opposed to further legal integration, such as citizenship law (Blauberger and Martinsen 2020). Moreover, CJEU judgments are increasingly (and negatively) reported in the media (Blauberger et al 2018; Dederke 2021).…”