“Can Legitimacy Transfer? A Comparative Study of Public Support for the European Court of Justice and the Bundesverfassungsgericht”

Grosskopf, Anke. (1999) “Can Legitimacy Transfer? A Comparative Study of Public Support for the European Court of Justice and the Bundesverfassungsgericht”. In: UNSPECIFIED, Pittsburgh, PA. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

As the power of constitutional courts all over the world is increasing, we still know very little about support for emergent courts and especially how support for supranational courts develops. To better understand the development of support for constitutional courts, I use a combination of the statistical and the comparative method to analyze the sources of confidence in constitutional courts in four cases. The comparison extends both cross-nationally and cross-institutionally by contrasting public support of a well-established constitutional court-the Federal Constitutional court or Bundesverfassungsgericht in West Germany-to support for three emergent courts, the Bundesverfassungsgericht in East Germany and the European Court of Justice in both West and East Germany. Following David Easton and his notion of an interconnected support universe, the main source of diffuse support considered is support for the other institutions of government. For the supranational court, the European Court of Justice, the possibility of a transfer of support from the national to the supranational level is given special consideration. Analysis of the data reveals that constitutional courts do indeed live in an interconnected support universe. Support for the legislative executive has a consistently strong, positive impact on support for supreme courts both at the national and the supranational level. In addition, there is evidence that support for national supreme courts does indeed translate into support for supreme courts at the supranational level, i.e., for the European Court of Justice. Overall, the similarity of the sources of support for these courts is more striking than the differences.

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