The impact of judicial preferences and political context on Constitutional Court decisions: Evidence from Turkey

Abstract

Many scholars have asserted that in countries where one political party dominates the political sphere, the likelihood of judges deciding against the government diminishes. Although the underlying logic of this argument is quite appealing, it does not explain why in certain cases judges ignore possible political retaliation and give anti-government decisions. Arguing that judicial preferences and the political context under which judges operate are in constant interaction, the goal of this article is to explain whether, and to what extent, the judges’ preferences moderate the impact of political fragmentation on the court’s invalidation of laws. The study uses an original data set including all decisions made by the Turkish Constitutional Court between 1984 and 2010. The empirical findings show that while the court’s political preferences vastly attenuate the impact of the political context on judicial behavior, its legal preferences have a trivial moderating effect. To put it more specifically, the results show that the effect of political fragmentation on judicial behavior highly decreases when there is a weak political alignment between the court and the government enacting the law under review. Moreover, the findings show that even under favorable political conditions for assertive behavior, the judges abstain from annulling laws based on individual rights violations.