How to place non-majoritarian institutions and political actors in a common policy space : Spatial modeling of court–executive interactions

Abstract

How can we estimate positions of non-majoritarian institutions in a common policy space?To answer this question, we take highest courts as examples of powerful non-majoritarianinstitutions and develop a new scaling approach to estimate their position in a commonpolicy space with other political actors. In contrast to previous research, our approachneither relies on individual votes of justices nor assumes that justices “inherit” positionsfrom political actors who nominated them. Instead, for each court decision, we use thepositions of political actors expressed in written statements as well as the courts’ decisionoutcome to estimate comparable policy positions. In two applications, we position theGerman Federal Constitutional Court with different German governments and the Eu-ropean Court of Justice with different European governments in common policy spacesand validate them. Finally, we show how our common policy scores can be used to studycourt–executive relations and inter-institutional interactions.