CJEU judgments in the news – capturing the public salience of decisions of the EU’s highest court

Abstract

ABSTRACT Case salience data are prominent in the US judicial politics literature. By contrast, such data is not available for most other courts. With the continued judicialization of politics in the EU and the CJEU’s growing importance, court decisions could increasingly receive public attention. Inspired by US case salience data this paper provides insight into new data on newspaper coverage of 4357 CJEU decisions in eight EU broadsheets. Asking under which conditions newspapers report on judicial decisions, the article links theoretical expectations about the public salience of court decisions with empirical data on CJEU case salience. Multi-level regression models show that the salience of CJEU decisions varies depending on the standing of courts in national political systems, case characteristics, inter-institutional conflict, and the Court’s public relations activities. These findings have implications for the perception and communication of the CJEU and provide initial insights into media attention for hundreds of CJEU cases.