The Euro-Model of Judicial Governance and Its Impact on Democratic Quality (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Challenges to the Rule of Law in Europe

Abstract

For some decades now, the model of strong Judicial Councils has been promoted by the European Union and the Council of Europe as a soft standard for judicial governance in the continent, to the detriment of rival approaches. However, in EU Member States such as Poland or Hungary, this arrangement has not been able to prevent backsliding into authoritarianism. This paper empirically analyses the contribution of different models of judicial governance to democratic quality in European and Eurasian countries. To do so, the article relies on a novel dataset of 46 countries, in which the different aspects of design of their models of judicial governance are codified and analysed using two different tools: statistical analysis with robust regression techniques, and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The provisional findings of the paper suggest that the type of model of judicial governance only has a marginal effect on the improvement of democratic quality in the countries of the sample. However, there is one aspect of the design of models for judicial governance that does have a meaningful effect on democratic quality: the level of independence of these institutions. At the policy level, these provisional findings suggest that European institutions should re-think their approach to judicial governance in Member States, in order to afford a more resilient protection of democracy.

Author

• Pablo Castillo Ortiz, University of Sheffield