The effective functioning of the administration of justice represents an essential pillar for the stability of democratic regimes and rule of law. If courts do not offer a fair, efficient, and accessible institution to their legal disputes, they are likely to try to resolve their conflicts through informal and more violent means. In addition, a well performing and fair judiciary is also relevant for protecting citizens from abuses from the executive and legislative branches. In this paper, we wonder on the determinants explaining satisfaction with justice, as a decisive branch of the quality of democracies. Which are the factors explaining citizens' satisfaction with justice? We propose two complementary explanations. On the one hand, we use endogenous factors on how justice is working. In order to test this explanation, we can use data from European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice on factual data from the respective justice systems (e.g. Judicial independence, economic and institutional endowment, structure of the judiciary, etc.). On the other hand, we also use exogenous factors such as public opinion issues, such as perceived fairness, impartiality, or corruption within the judiciary, through the European Social survey data in Trust in Criminal Justice. We will use a multi level approach in order to control the institutional variation between countries and to understand the impact of judicial institutions on citizens' attitudes towards the judiciary and its consequences for public support for democracies.
