Judicial Positions on Political Reform: Designing Common Policy Scores from Judicial Text

What are the positions of highest courts towards political reform? In order to answer this question, it is essential to derive common scores of judicial decisions that map onto a policy space. While scholarship on the US Supreme Court uses judicial votes to design respective measures, votes are often not available in cross-country comparison. Therefore, we present an approach to scale judicial decisions based on features commonly reported in judicial decisions. In order to do so, we link existing scaling procedures to novel developments in computer assisted text-analysis. First, we follow established scholarship to identify the polarity of citations in judicial decisions to locate opinions in a doctrine space. Second, to map opinion locations onto a policy space we apply semantic analyses to identify the polarity of briefs field by political actors. Third, we use the known positions of political actors as anchoring vignettes to meaningful place the opinion locations in relation to the political positions on one common space. The procedure applies independent of specific judicial systems but to outline the feasibility, we assess 2211 senate decisions by the German Federal Constitutional Court published until 2017. The court is an archetypal constitutional court representative of highest courts in a majority of EU countries following the civil law tradition. Our computed spatial measures allow for assessing the judiciaries’ willingness to support or hinder political reform. Moreover, the scores permit for behavioral research on courts independent of judicial votes. This has major implications for our understanding of courts as (political) actors.