Litigating Federalism: An Empirical Analysis of Decisions of the Belgian Constitutional Court

Pellegrina, Lucia Dalla; Mot, Jef De; Faure, Michael; Garoupa, Nuno

doi:10.1017/s1574019617000050

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Four characteristics of the court make it an exciting case to study. First, by identifying and characterizing the bases of judicial disagreement on a generalist apex court, we add to the growing literature on apex courts in Europe, which have mainly been concerned with specialized constitutional courts (e.g., Hönnige 2009; Pellegrina & Garoupa 2013; Coroado et al 2017; Pellegrina et al 2017; De Jaegere 2019; Popelier & Bielen 2019). Second, the change in the court's docket means that policy‐relevant cases are much more common.…”

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Government Deference Dimension of Judicial Decision Making: Evidence from the Supreme Court of Norway

2020

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Past research has revealed conflicting findings regarding the degree to which judges on European apex courts enact their policy preferences or instead disagree on the basis of divergent legal views. We investigate disagreement between judges on the Norwegian Supreme Court between 1996 and 2016. During this period, the court dealt with a greater volume of policy-relevant cases than previously. The method of appointment to the court was also changed to a judicial appointments commission. We analyse non-unanimous cases using item response theory models. We find that judges are not divided along left-right lines but instead disagree about the appropriate degree of deference to give to public authorities. There is no significant association between the appointing government and judges' ideal points either before or after the reform to appointments. Judges who were formerly academics are however much less deferential than career judges or judges who were previously lawyers in private practice.

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Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Government Deference Dimension of Judicial Decision Making: Evidence from the Supreme Court of Norway

2020

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“…By contrast, the design and functioning of specialized constitutional courts in the European model are considered either to guarantee political neutrality (Ferejohn and Pasquino 2004) or at least to make it impossible to empirically test the impact of ideological preference due to their closed and consensual deliberations. Emerging scholarship nevertheless applies the attitudinal model also to European courts, revealing that judicial behavior in Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Belgium is also influenced by political preferences (Dalla Pellegrina & Garoupa 2013;Dalla Pellegrina et al 2016;Garoupa et al 2013;Magalhaes 2013).…”

Section: 2the Attitudinal Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reporter and president characteristics (Hypotheses 4, 5a and 5b) First, we control for judge ideological affiliation. In another study on the Belgian Constitutional Court, Dalla Pellegrina et al (2016) used a variable indicating the president's and reporters' affiliation with the petitioner's coalition as a measure of judge ideology. This is not useful for our study on federalism disputes, however, since the president and reporters are likely to be affiliated with the defendant's coalition because sub-state and federal coalitions in Belgium usually overlap.…”

Section: Political Conflict (Hypothesis 3)mentioning

confidence: 99%

How Courts Decide Federalism Disputes: Legal Merit, Attitudinal Effects, and Strategic Considerations in the Jurisprudence of the Belgian Constitutional Court

Popelier

Bielen

2018

Publius: The Journal of Federalism

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An urgent question in contemporary federal theory is how institutions impact upon the centralization grade of multi-tiered systems. This article focuses on constitutional courts as one of such institutions. It constructs a classification for measuring a court’s position in federalism disputes and tests hypotheses about what determines variation across decisions within one court. The case study is Belgium, as a model of contemporary fragmenting systems. We find that if the defending party is the federal government, the probability of a centralist outcome increases compared to when a sub-state government is the defendant, and vice versa. Evidence suggests that legal merit plays a role to this effect. We further find that each state reform decreases the probability of a centralist outcome. This appears to be a consequence of strategic considerations. We finally find suggestive evidence that the organization of the court does not fully succeed in playing down judges' ideological preferences.

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Assessing the impact of federalism on constitutional compliance

Kantorowicz,

Voigt

2024

Const Polit Econ

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Federalism is a constitutionalized version of multi-tier governance. Proponents of veto-player theory argue that a high number of veto players leads to a high degree of policy stability. Compared to states with a unitary structure, federal countries, in which at least one sub-central level of government is constitutionally recognized and endowed with some degree of exclusive competences, dispose of a higher number of veto players, who can voice and challenge constitutional non-compliance by the central government. In this paper, we therefore ask whether federally constituted states also enjoy a higher degree of constitutional compliance, i.e. have governments that respect and enforce the promises made in their country’s constitution. At the same time, with a higher number of governments under federalism, there are more chances that some of them will not comply with constitutional constraints leading to greater non-compliance. To test these hypotheses, we employ data from up to 163 countries and apply standard panel data estimation techniques. Our results indicate that federalism is neither positively nor negatively correlated with constitutional compliance of the respective countries.

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Litigating Federalism: An Empirical Analysis of Decisions of the Belgian Constitutional Court

Cited by 7 publications

References 17 publications

The Government Deference Dimension of Judicial Decision Making: Evidence from the Supreme Court of Norway

The Government Deference Dimension of Judicial Decision Making: Evidence from the Supreme Court of Norway

How Courts Decide Federalism Disputes: Legal Merit, Attitudinal Effects, and Strategic Considerations in the Jurisprudence of the Belgian Constitutional Court

Assessing the impact of federalism on constitutional compliance

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