Abstract
The author analyses the possible influence of judges' ideological beliefs on the Czech Constitutional court decision making. The theoretical of the chapter part thus focuses on the discussions on the judicialization of politics, constitutional interpretation, judicial legitimacy and the attitudinal model of judicial decision making.
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. Political beliefs could be one of such factors.
Nevertheless, the author argues, that judges lack democratic legitimacy for making purely political decisions and so it is important that they suppress the conscious or subconscious tendency to decide the constitutional cases according to their ideological beliefs. It is thus useful to test the sceptical hypothesis, that what judges do is actually pure politics.
It is argued that the analysis of the decision making can be enriched by employing the statistical methods associated with political studies. In the second part of the chapter the author therefore tries to find out, if it is possible to see the voting of the judges of the Czech Constitutional court as politically motivated.
Using the statistical methods he first examines the possibility that the judges form voting coalitions. He analyses the extent of common voting of each pair of judges and the possible formation of larger voting blocks.
Then he similarly analyses the voting behaviour in the cases of close vote. The final part of the analysis dedicates special attention to the decisions about the motions made by other political actors and to the question, whether it is possible to identify the political alignment of the judges' voting behav-iour.
The author concludes, that the political ideology only influenced a small amount of cases decided during the period of "second" Constitutional Court.