Working Papers

Principal-agent relationships are a defining feature of political institutions. In legislative and executive settings, ensuring that agents reflect a principal’s preferences is a central aim. In courts, however, such alignment can undermine the impartiality of judicial decision-making. Yet many judiciaries grant a principal—often the court’s president—discretion to assign cases to judges, creating opportunities for undue influence. I argue that court presidents can strategically assign cases to judges who share their preferences, and that judges, anticipating future rewards such as desirable assignments, may align their rulings accordingly. An analysis of decisions at the Court of Justice of the European Union supports this account. I conclude by recommending random assignment of cases to judges as a pragmatic, though imperfect, institutional reform to reduce these biases.

International law’s expanding scope has led to high profile confrontations between international and domestic courts. In this article, we argue that these inter-court conflicts present opportunities for domestic courts to increase their public support by leveraging political backlash against international institutions. We test our argument with an original survey that overlapped the German Federal Constitutional Court’s (GFCC) landmark “ECB decision” in May 2020, which directly challenged the authority of the Court of Justice of the European Union. We find that public support for the GFCC increased in the immediate aftermath of the ruling, particularly among those opposed to European Union authority and aware of the decision, but that this effect subsequently dissipated. Our results thus identify inter-court conflicts as a potential, but critically limited, strategy for domestic courts to develop public support with implications for the efficacy of both domestic courts and international institutions.

Public backlash against international organizations (IO) is increasingly commonplace in global politics. Whether such hostility results from the actions of IOs themselves, however, is difficult to isolate from other plausible explanations of anti-globalization sentiment. To theoretically specify this causal pathway, we focus on international courts for their generalizability across IOs and their role in enforcing regime rules. We argue that international court decisions against governments may cause a decrease in public support for an IO, as such jurisprudence directly places an international agreement in opposition to democratically-elected policymakers and, by extension, their voters. Leveraging a Court of Justice of European Union ruling invalidating elements of the Polish government’s judicial reforms that overlapped the Spring 2023 Eurobarometer survey, we find that trust in the European Union decreased following the decision, most prominently among government supporters. Our results suggest that enforcing regime rules may at times entail public legitimacy costs for IOs.

Governments create monitoring entities to ensure that policymakers are working effectively. Increasing transparency in the retention and selection of policymakers, however, may create incentives that lead to sub-optimal outcomes. One such entity is a “merit commission” (also known as a judicial council) that evaluates judges subject to reten- tion and/or selection. How do merit commissions affect judicial behavior? Using a formal model, we show that lower-competence incumbent judges only subject to merit retention will complete cases more quickly at the expense of quality opinion writing, as their productivity is a signal of their effort. Conversely, judges subject to merit selection and subsequent retention will not make the same tradeoff, as it is more costly for a commission to negatively evaluate a judge upon retention after it has already selected them. We provide evidence leveraging the Article 255 panel for (re)appointments to the Court of Justice of the European Union.

The judiciary’s ability to safeguard liberal democracy critically depends on whether government institutions abide by their rulings. Among other constraints, courts face the possibility of the legislature overriding unwanted decisions when adjudicating cases in which legislators have an interest. I argue that this threat heightens when courts’ decisions affect legislative agenda-setters that can prioritize bills favoring override, prompting courts to act strategically in response. Leveraging exogenous variation in agenda-setting power from the six-month rotating terms of the Council of the European Union Presidency, I provide evidence that the Court of Justice of the European Union strategically delays deciding a case when the member state holding the Presidency expresses interest in the case’s outcome. A difference-in-differences design demonstrates that this effect disappeared with the introduction of the Trio Presidency in 2007, which reduced each individual Presidency’s agenda-setting power.

This paper considers the interaction of two prominent global trends: the expansion of international law and the rising politicization of domestic institutions. As international legal processes frequently incorporate domestic institutions, how citizens react to the development of international law may become influenced by their perceptions of those domestic institutions. We argue that involving politicized domestic institutions in the international legal decision-making process increases support for rulings among those that believe domestic institutions are favorable towards their political party but weakens it for those who believe they are unfavorable. The results of a survey experi- ment fielded in Hungary provide partial support for our argument. While we find that opposition partisans withdraw support for a European Union law decision when it is issued by a Hungarian court rather than directly by the European Court of Justice, we find no support-enhancing effect for this treatment among the Fidesz government’s supporters.

EU law and politics research is caught between two competing narratives: a progressive narrative of self-reinforcing legal integration and a more law-abiding Union, and a regressive narrative of dissensus and legal disintegration. In this paper, we suggest an alternative theory of “intercurrence”. We argue that intercurrence arises when overlapping legal orders become unevenly aligned with salient political cleavages, transforming these legal conflicts in larger political battles. We illustrate the purchase and scope conditions of our theory via two empirical case studies: the evolving tensions between the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and national courts, and the erosion and contestation of EU law enforcement after the 2004 enlargement. Our findings reveal that while the EU’s legal order is not self-sustaining, legal challenges remain contained, implying that intercurrence does not necessarily foreshadow disintegration.

Legal traditions shape citizens’ relationships with their courts. Building upon scholarship examining how common law and civil law systems affect a variety of economic and political outcomes, we ask whether legal traditions affect citizens’ support for judicial power. Relative to common law, we argue that civil law judiciaries may appear to citizens as unfairly favoring the state, ignoring the context of their specific cases, and inefficient, thus dampening their willingness to obey court decisions. To test our theory, we leverage variation in legal tradition across 33 African states and Afrobarometer survey data across six survey rounds with over 200,000 respondents. We find in civil law countries that citizens’ perceptions that the law treats people unequally mediates their lower support for vertical judicial power relative to common law countries.

Research assessing judges’ political preferences typically focuses on courts that publish individual votes and opinions, yet many courts issue per curiam judgments that do not permit public dissent. To overcome this limitation, we use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to model the variation in judges’ expressed preferences from language in aggregated judgments. Specifically, we apply CNNs to analyze the written judgments of judges-rapporteur and opinions of advocates-general from the Court of Justice of the European Union. Along a pro/anti-EU dimension, we estimate how judgments differ within (1) each case relative to the advocate-general’s opinion, and (2) each judge-rapporteur, which measures how judges alter their writing across cases. Our results provide novel empirical support for theoretic models of European judicial decision-making: more pro-EU opinions driven by the Court, not the advocates-general or judge-rapporteur, are associated with largerchambers and stronger external signals of compliance.

The judiciary is frequently reliant on executive and legislative bodies to implement its decisions. Scholars argue that public trust in the judiciary helps compel the other branches to comply. As noncompliance may erode public trust, courts are sensitive to government threats to not implement their decisions. Public trust, however, is also contingent on a court maintaining a consistent case law, which may require it making unpopular decisions that risk government noncompliance. How can courts manage this tension? I argue that when the legal merits favor a ruling against a government’s preferences and the threat of noncompliance is high a court will provide the government more flexibility in implementing its ruling. This strategy allows courts to build public trust through the appearance of government compliance, while also building trust by advancing case law in a legally consistent manner. An analysis of Court of Justice of the European Union decisions provides evidence supporting this account.