Chapter 1 Constitutional review and judicial-legislative relations in established democracies

Abstract

Recent confrontations between constitutional courts and parliamentary majorities in several European countries have attracted international interest in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature.Some political actors have argued that courts have assumed too much power and politics has been extremely judicialized. Yet the extent to which this aggregation of power may have constrained the dominant political actors’ room for manoeuvre has never been examined accurately and systematically. This volume fills this gap in the literature. To explore the diversity and measure the strength of judicial decisions, the authors have elaborated a new methodology that is intended to give a more nuanced picture of the practice of constitutional adjudication in Europe. The work opens with an assessment of the existing literature on empirical analysis of judicial decisions with a special focus on Western Europe and a short summary of the methodology of the project. This is followed by 11 country studies and a concluding chapter providing a comprehensive comparative analysis of the results. A further ten countries are explored in the counterpart volume to this book: Constitutional Review in Central and Eastern Europe: Judicial-Legislative Relations in Comparative Perspective The collection will be an invaluable resource for those working in the areas of empirical legal research and comparative constitutional law, as well as political scientists interested in judicial politics.