Current Projects

How to place non-majoritarian institutions and political actors in a common policy space: Spatial modeling of court–executive interactions

Find the working paper here. (Version: 12/2021) AbstractHow can we estimate positions of non-majoritarian institutions in a common policy space? To answer this question, we take highest courts as examples of powerful non-majoritarian institutions and develop a new scaling approach to estimate their position in a common policy space with other political actors. In contrast […]

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Citizens’ Commitment to Judicial Independence

Find the working paper here. (Version: 10/2021) AbstractIn contrast to the more common focus on judicial independence in relation to government institutions, we study under what conditions citizens are willing to trade democratic principles in favor of expected partisan gains? To disentangle this trade-off, we administered discrete choice experiments in surveys across nine European countries

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Who reaches the Bench?

Find the working paper here. (Version: 11/2018) Abstract How do citizens evaluate judicial nominees for highest courts? Previous research solely based on the US Supreme Court points at two dimensions: judiciousness and the nominee’s partisan leaning. While these dimensions are not likely to be independent from one another the identification strategies previously applied are not

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