Current Projects

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

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 …

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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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