Publications

International courts are increasingly serving as bulwarks of democracy. These courts, however, often depend on the cooperation of the very governments they seek to hold accountable, exposing them to potential retaliation for attempting to constrain their behavior. As governments’ response to adverse decision-making is often conditional on public support, we explore whether citizens actually support international courts’ judicial power over questions of democracy. We argue that citizens’ support for this form of judicial power depends on their democratic values and their desire for institutional checks and balances against the executive. Furthermore, we contest that this support is conditional on partisanship, with this relationship holding for opposition partisans while government partisans are generally opposed to international courts’ judicial power. We support our expectations using original survey data collected from Hungary before their 2022 national legislative elections, and examining citizens’ support for judicial power for the Court of Justice of the European Union.

With democratic backsliding spreading globally, international courts increasingly find themselves serving as democratic guardrails. This task poses a challenge, as national governments may attempt to punish international courts for trying to constrain their backsliding agendas. Since a government’s calculus for attacking a court is likely influenced by public opinion, we consider the impact of partisanship on the extent of public support for backlash against international courts in backsliding democracies. We theorize that support for backlash is driven by more than partisanship alone. For government partisans, support for backlash decreases with support for the international organization to which the court belongs, while for opposition partisans it depends on their commitment to the democratic norms the court’s decision defends. We support our expectations by analyzing original survey data collected from Hungary in March 2022, immediately following a major pro-democracy decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Explanations for the successful expansion and consolidation of the European Union and its legal system have long emphasized the importance of domestic courts sending preliminary references to the Court of Justice. Key to many of these theoretical accounts is the claim that domestic courts are better equipped to compel national governments to comply with EU law than the bloc’s high court, the Court of Justice. Integrating insights from the comparative judicial politics literature into the context of the EU’s preliminary references system, we provide a theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim by arguing that incorporating domestic courts into the EU legal process enhances public support for expansive judicial interpretations of EU law. We go on to argue, however, that this transference of legitimacy depends on citizens’ views of the national and European courts. We support our argument with evidence from a preregistered survey experiment fielded in Germany.

Institutional designers of judiciaries often want to provide the appearance of impartiality. As a result, many collegial courts issue per curiam rulings in which judges’ votes are not public. An extensive scholarship, however, provides evidence that ideology and mechanisms of retention affect judicial decision-making. Do per curiam rulings actively mitigate or provide cover for ideological and career-oriented judicial decision-making? I argue that – when serving as the rapporteur (opinion-writer) – a judge on a civil law per curiam court can steer their panel towards the outcome their appointer prefers. When their appointing government turns over, nonetheless, a judge is not compelled to change their decision-making to be in line with their new government, as per curiam rulings protect them from retaliation. An analysis of decisions at the Court of Justice of the European Union provides evidence for this account.

A successful democratic transition requires citizens to embrace a new set of political institutions. Citizens’ support is vital for these institutions to uphold the burgeoning constitutional and legal order. Courts, for example, often rely on citizens’ support and threat of electoral punishment against the government to enforce their rulings. In this article, I consider whether education under democracy can engender this support. Using regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences, and difference-in-difference-in-differences designs, I find an additional year of schooling after the fall of the Berlin Wall has similar positive downstream effects on East Germans’ support across institutions. Since schooling similarly affects public support for judicial, legislative, and executive institutions, citizens are not necessarily inclined to electorally punish the other branches when they ignore a court’s ruling. This potential inability of courts to constrain unlawful government behavior threatens the foundation of the separation of powers and the survival of democracy.

Under what conditions will international compliance-monitoring institutions pursue violations of international law? The European Commission’s infringement procedure is a multi-step process that culminates at the Court of Justice of the European Union when a member state has allegedly violated EU law. The Commission, however, does not have meaningful enforcement powers, and may potentially spend valuable time and resources on a case only for a member state to continue to not comply with EU law. To manage this opportunity cost of pursuing other violations of EU law, I argue that the Commission will strategically delay advancing a case through the infringement procedure when it anticipates the political conditions will be more favorable for compliance in the future. I provide evidence that the Commission delays infringement proceedings when it expects the election of a more pro-EU or more left-wing government that will be more likely to comply than the incumbent government.

International institutions can create pretrial bargaining procedures to resolve disputes over noncompliance with international law. In this article, we consider how international institutions can improve the efficiency of pretrial bargaining, thereby improving compliance. We use a quasi-experimental research design and difference-in-difference (DD) estimators to analyze the effectiveness of a recent policy initiative in the European Union (EU) — called EU Pilot — that was designed to improve the efficiency of pre- trial bargaining in the EU. By evaluating the effectiveness of EU Pilot, we provide new evidence of a proposed management school solution to noncompliance — proper rule interpretation. By prevent accidental noncompliance, EU Pilot allows the Commission and member states to more quickly process cases involving intentional noncompliance, improving the efficiency of pretrial bargaining in the EU.

Courts regularly delegate tasks to individual or small subsets of judges. While a substantial literature addresses delegation in the context of American courts, less is known about why and how courts delegate from a comparative perspective. With many of the world's high courts using chamber systems by which the court delegates cases to subsets of judges, this limitation of the extant literature leaves a number of empirical and theoretical questions unanswered. We argue that the threat of noncompliance presents one factor influencing the use chambers. From our expectation that cases with a greater risk for noncompliance will not be sent to chambers, we then derive empirical implications for case disposition and the willingness of a court to rule contrary to the legal merits in a case. An empirical analysis of chamber usage in preliminary reference cases at the Court of Justice of the European Union provides evidence supporting our account.

How courts ensure the efficacy of their decisions poses one of the central challenges to the quality of modern liberal democracy. In this article, we consider how the ability of domestic courts to engage with their international counterparts through preliminary reference procedures can further this goal. Arguing that domestic courts use preliminary reference procedures to affect the probability their governments comply with adverse judicial decisions, we construct a formal model of the reference procedure and test a series of empirical implications with a novel dataset of domestic court cases involving the European Union's preliminary reference procedure. We find that courts are more likely to refer cases as the risk of noncompliance increases and that this relationship is conditioned by the level of public trust in the Court of Justice of the European Union and the position of a court in the domestic judicial hierarchy

The European Union increasingly relies on the willingness of citizens to support the delegation of authority from their national governments to European institutions. Major policy crises have the ability to profoundly shape public support and opposition to greater European integration. In this article, we consider the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for public support of greater European integration. We build on the utilitarian approaches to develop an account of the pandemic’s implications for citizens’ views on the need for more EU-level policy making. We contend that higher levels of concern for COVID-19 correspond to higher support for further European integration. We then go on to argue that this relationship is conditioned by ideology. We find support for our hypotheses using a nationally-representative survey of 4400 German respondents fielded in April and May 2020.

Under what conditions do the institutional features of courts affect the efficiency of judicial decision-making? Examining the Court of Justice of the European Union’s mandate that all judgments be written in French, I argue that francophone judges—i.e. judges from France, French-speaking Belgium, and Luxembourg—write judgments more efficiently than their non-francophone counterparts. Leveraging the institutional feature of the judge-rapporteur and using matching methods, I show that comparable cases with a francophone judge-rapporteur are a month shorter on average than cases with a non-francophone judge-rapporteur. This estimate is robust to scaling the judgments by their word counts. Although I provide evidence francophones write judgments with lower lexical diversity on average than non-francophones, existing empirical measures are limited in examining differences in judgment quality. These findings have implications for the efficient processing of cases at the Court of Justice and the potential consequences of adopting a lingua franca in the European Union.