Current Projects

Find the working paper here. (Version: 12/2021) AbstractWhat are the positions of highest courts towards political reform? Answering this question requires to place courts in a common space with political actors. Americanists rely on individual votes to estimate justices’ positions. Comparativists face challenges: First, votes are not published everywhere. Second, positions from judicial votes map …

A Common Policy Space: Estimating positions of highest courts and political actors using amici briefs Read More »

AbstractTo what extent is a constitutional court an integral actor in the system of checks and balances? In order to answer this question, we present the novel Constitutional Court Database (CCDB) which links (1) 2006 Senate decisions (2) combining 3284 different proceedings referred to the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC) between 1972 to 2010 to …

The Constitutional Court Database Read More »

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 …

Citizens’ Commitment to Judicial Independence Read More »

Abstract Constitutional courts around the world vary in the transparency they provide surrounding their rulings. While some courts by law never publish individual judges’ votes on court decisions, other courts always publish these votes by norm. However, if a court can choose how much information to reveal about its internal agreement, what will it choose …

Signaling in the Spotlight Read More »

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 …

Who reaches the Bench? Read More »