Supranationalism, constrained? Locating the Court of Justice on the EU integration dimension

Abstract

The European Court of Justice is generally known to use its institutional role to advance European integration. Scholars have disagreed, however, on the extent to which the Court fears and anticipates negative reactions to its rulings from the Member States. Without a possibility to access internal deliberations, such strategic behaviour by the Court makes it empirically challenging to identify its preferences relative to other actors. I tackle this problem using an item-response theory model designed to estimate institutional preferences from cases concerning procedural and competence disputes. I find that the Court leans on average towards more supranational positions, while also systematically adjusting its rulings in response to Member States’ preferences. Controlling for these effects reveals the European Court of Justice to be even more partial to supranationalism than the pattern of its decisions suggests.

Aspects of Expanding the Interaction between the State and Civil Society

“…We fully support Ovádek's (2021) position that the judicial authorities should also use its institutional role to promote European integration. Thus, he defines that justice, which gives limited access to its citizens (rather than full -that is, without the expansion of interaction between state and society) makes it quite difficult to talk about the benefits of such a system.…”

One agenda-setter or many? The varying success of policy initiatives by individual Directorates-General of the European Commission 1994–2016

“…Such research could also account for whether the allocation of policy proposals to individual Commission DGs follows strategic considerations in the first place. Case studies show that the distribution of proposal responsibilities is contested inside the Commission (Hartlapp et al., 2014) while large-N research shows that the Commission is aware of the procedural implications of allocating policies to specific legal bases in the EU treaties (Ovádek, 2020b). Yet, we do not know whether the individual DGs’ capacities to muster high quality anticipation affect these choices as well.…”

“…Initially, we need to capture procedural characteristics . The Council majority rule ( H1 ) has been coded by extracting the CELEX reference of the respective treaty articles a Commission proposal is formally based on (using Ovádek, 2020a). This information could then be matched to the manual coding of Council decision rules in individual Treaty articles kindly shared by Michal Ovádek (2020b).…”

“…The Council majority rule ( H1 ) has been coded by extracting the CELEX reference of the respective treaty articles a Commission proposal is formally based on (using Ovádek, 2020a). This information could then be matched to the manual coding of Council decision rules in individual Treaty articles kindly shared by Michal Ovádek (2020b). Preference heterogeneity in the Council ( H2 ) is measured along the pro/anti EU and left/right dimensions conventionally used to model the policy space in the EU.…”

Coalitions in international litigation: a network perspective

“…Some institutions (e.g. ECB) have authority over narrow policy domains, limiting the range of cases in which they may be involved, while member states differ considerably in economic size, political influence and familiarity with EU law litigation [26][27][28][29].…”