Prof. Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute Bonn): The German Constitutional Court – Political, but not Partisan?

In this episode of the CLE vlog & podcast series, Prof. Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn) and Prof. Stefan Bechtold (ETH Zurich) discuss Engel's recent study on the German Constitutional Court. The latter has powers that are no weaker than the powers of the US Supreme Court. Justices are openly selected by the political parties. Nonetheless, public and professional perception are strikingly different. Justices at the German court are not believed to be guided by the policy preferences of the nominating party. In his paper, Prof. Engel uses the complete publicly available data to investigate whether this perception is well-founded. It exploits three independent sources of quasi-random variation to generate causal evidence. There is no smoking gun of ideological influence. Some specifications show, however, that justices nominated by the left-wing parties (SPD and the Greens) are more activist, even in domains where activism likely runs counter the ideological preferences of these parties. Paper References: Christoph Engel – Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn The German Constitutional Court – Political, but not Partisan? (Work in Progress) Audio Credits for Trailer: AllttA by AllttA https://youtu.be/ZawLOcbQZ2w