Estimating Judicial Ideal Points in the Spanish Supreme Court: The Case of Administrative Review
26 Pages Posted: 22 Jul 2014
Date Written: July 22, 2014
Abstract
This paper presents an estimation of ideal points for the Justices of the Supreme Court of Spain in the specific area of administrative review for the period 2000-2008. The estimated ideal points allow us to identify political clusters in the Supreme Court which seems inconsistent with the formal and traditional views that a career judiciary is not strongly politically aligned and favors consensus, formalism and dissent avoidance. We suggest that our empirical analysis mitigates the myth of political insulation by career judges.
Keywords: career judges, judicial behavior, empirical legal studies, Spanish Supreme Court, ideal point, ideology
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