Supranationalism, constrained? Locating the Court of Justice on the EU integration dimension

Michal Ovádek

European Union Politics, 2021, vol. 22, issue 1, 46-69

Abstract: The European Court of Justice is generally known to use its institutional role to advance European integration. Scholars have disagreed, however, on the extent to which the Court fears and anticipates negative reactions to its rulings from the Member States. Without a possibility to access internal deliberations, such strategic behaviour by the Court makes it empirically challenging to identify its preferences relative to other actors. I tackle this problem using an item-response theory model designed to estimate institutional preferences from cases concerning procedural and competence disputes. I find that the Court leans on average towards more supranational positions, while also systematically adjusting its rulings in response to Member States’ preferences. Controlling for these effects reveals the European Court of Justice to be even more partial to supranationalism than the pattern of its decisions suggests.

Keywords: European Court of Justice; ideal point estimation; item-response theory; supranationalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116520967414 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:22:y:2021:i:1:p:46-69

DOI: 10.1177/1465116520967414

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().