Tale of Two Courts: Explaining Variation in Decision-Making of the Russian Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights

In this paper I will present first empirical results of my PhD thesis, which is focused on the Russian Constitutional Court, as one of institutions established and further institutionalised as a pro-democratic one, and how does it balance itself in the existing political regime in Russia and whether such practices change over time. To answer this question, I narrow down my focus on the interaction between the RCC and the ECtHR, taking a look at the case law of both judicial bodies. This angle allows to see how decision making practices of the RCC have changed over time (1998 – 2018), and test the influence of various factors on the outcomes of cases. Analysing how the ECtHR decides in similar cases, will provide a ground for comparison and coming up with the results on how domestic and international courts are different (if so at all), and under which conditions they diverge. For the conference I will present first results based on the analysis of self-collected databases of the RCC and the ECtHR case-law from 1998 to 2018.