Nuno Garoupa and Veronica Grembi (University of Illinois College of Law and Catholic University of Milan) have posted Judicial Review and Political Bias: Moving from Consensual to Majoritarian Democracy on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
- Due to the collapse of the party system during the mid-nineties, Italy represents an interesting case study to test the eff ects of a moving from a consensual to a majoritarian democracy on judicial behavior at the level of the Constitutional Court. Using a dataset of 779 main reviews (ricorsi in via principale) from 1985 to 2005, and proposing new measures of political alignment within constitutional review, we analyze the impact of a change in the political party system on judicial behavior. We preliminarily result indicate that the rulings of a majoritarian democracy tend to produce more political aligned decisions than in a consensual democracy.