The Role of Constitutional Courts in the Establishment and Maintenance of Democratic Systems of Government

TLDR

Courts are pivotal in establishing and maintaining constitutional democracies. The authors develop a strategic model of judges, executives, and legislators to explain court behavior, illustrated using Russia’s Constitutional Court. The model integrates substantive literature and theories of strategic interaction, and is applied to Russia to generate predictions. The model predicts specific interactions among political actors and suggests that its insights can inform the study of courts across Eastern Europe and beyond.

Abstract

What role do courts play in the establishment and maintenance of constitutional democracies? To address this question, we elaborate a model that draws on existing substantive literature and on theories that assume strategic behavior on the part of judges, executives, and legislatures. This model, in turn, leads to several behavioral predictions about the interactions among the relevant political actors. Although those predictions could be assessed in many distinct contexts, we focus on Russia. In particular, we provide a demonstration of how the model helps make sense of the behavior of the Constitutional Court ( Konstitucjonnyj sud ) in light of the difficult political situation it confronted. We conclude with some thoughts on the broader implications of our theory for the study of courts throughout Eastern Europe and how it may well illuminate constitutional politics in other parts of the world.