Are Advocates General Political? An Empirical Analysis of the Voting Behavior of the Advocates General at the European Court of Justice

Frankenreiter Jens ()
Additional contact information
Frankenreiter Jens: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, Germany

Review of Law & Economics, 2018, vol. 14, issue 1, 43

Abstract: The question whether political preferences of EU Member States play a role in the decision-making of the members of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has so far gone largely unanswered in the literature. This paper formally tests the hypothesis that the political preferences of Member State governments are reflected in the decisions of the Advocates General, who are judge-like members of the ECJ. The empirical analysis is motivated by a novel model of the interaction between the Advocate General and the judicial panel. Based on this model, the paper develops a formal test to answer whether there is a relationship between the policy preferences of EU Member State governments with regard to European integration and the decision behavior of Advocates General appointed by these governments. It then tests this hypothesis using a newly assembled dataset combining information on agreements and disagreements between the opinions issued by the Advocates General and the ensuing judgments of the ECJ in preliminary ruling proceedings with information on political preferences of Member State governments obtained from party manifesto data. The results of this test suggest that the votes of Advocates General reflect the political preferences of the appointing governments vis-à-vis European integration.

Keywords: judge behavior; European Court of Justice; roll call model; attitudinal model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/rle-2016-0037 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:rlecon:v:14:y:2018:i:1:p:43:n:3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/rle/html

DOI: 10.1515/rle-2016-0037

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Law & Economics is currently edited by Francesco Parisi

More articles in Review of Law & Economics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().