A Countermajoritarian Institution and Judicial Legitimacy in Germany

• In Event: Poster Session: Judicial Politics & Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Judicial Politics

Abstract

Prior scholarship has debated whether judicial legitimacy is a product of evaluations of courts’ performance or more fundamental democratic values. Yet existing work on judicial legitimacy mainly focuses on the case of the United States and rarely considers the broad institutional context in which courts operate. Focusing the role of courts as countermajoritarian institutions, we argue that citizens’ status as members of the political majority or minority moderate the impact of court-specific attitudes on judicial legitimacy. We test our theoretical expectation to understand the judicial legitimacy of the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany and provide evidence by analyzing both observational and experimental data based on a nationally representative sample. We show that ideological agreement with the FCC has a much stronger effect on legitimacy among members of the political minority, or those who are ideologically distant from the current governing coalition. Our framework has significant theoretical, empirical and normative implications for judicial legitimacy, law compliance, and institutional interactions.

Author

• Hyeonho Hahm, Hanyang University