Politics at the Constitutional Court : The Effect of Political Beliefs on the Votes of the “Second“ Czech Constitutional Court Judges. Part 1
Abstract
The author analyzes the role of politics in the process of the constitutional review decision making. The paper is divided into two parts, theoretical and empirical one.
The first part emphasizes the need to distinguish between the fact that courts' decisions have political consequences and the suspicion that those decisions are made in a political way. The theoretical part thus focuses on the discussions on the judiciaization of politics, constitutional interpretation, judicial legitimacy and the attitudinal model of judicial decision making.
It is argued that when studying the decision making of the constitutional courts the analysis can be enriched by employing the statistical methods associated with political studies - even in the civil law countries. Since the judge can no longer be seen only as “the mouth that pronounces the words of the law“, other factors than the text of law (or the Constitution) that determine their decisions should be taken into account.
Furthermore the skeptical hypothesis, that what judges do is actually pure politics, should be analyzed as well. In the second part of the paper I therefore try to find out, if we can see the voting of the judges of the Czech Constitutional court in constitutional review cases as politically motivated.
Using the statistical methods I examine the ideological consistency of voting of each of the judges in addition to trying to find out whether the judges form any voting coalitions or not.