The Politicization of Constitutional Courts: A Comparative Study of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal and the United States Supreme Court

This paper examines the politicization of constitutional courts through a comparative analysis of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal and the United States Supreme Court. The phenomenon of the politicization of justice refers to the process by which judicial institutions begin to resemble bodies of an explicitly political character, with political parties treating constitutional courts as a strategic resource to be captured, held, or wrested from opponents. Although the two cases are separated by different constitutional traditions and institutional histories, they share a common tendency: in both systems, judicial bodies have ceased to be regarded exclusively as impartial arbiters of constitutionality and have instead become arenas of ideological contestation. The paper draws on two complementary theoretical frameworks. The first is the concept of the politicization of justice, which operates along two analytically distinct dimensions: a structural dimension concerning the mechanisms through which political actors seek to determine the composition of courts, and a systemic dimension concerning the broader erosion of institutional independence that follows from sustained political pressure. The second is institutionalism, which provides the tools needed to explain why some courts prove more vulnerable to this process than others and why its effects prove more or less durable across different institutional contexts. Three concepts from this tradition are particularly relevant: path dependence, critical juncture, and institutional layering. The paper employs a qualitative comparative case study design based on a most-different systems logic. Poland and the United States differ significantly in constitutional tradition, legal culture, and the model of judicial review. The former belongs to the continental model of centralized constitutional review, while the latter operates within a common law system with decentralized judicial review and a historically powerful Supreme Court. When a similar outcome, namely the politicization of a constitutional court, appears in systems that are otherwise structurally dissimilar, this constitutes evidence in favor of the structural rather than locally contingent character of the underlying mechanism. The findings show that while the mechanisms of politicization are analogous in both systems, their pace and institutional consequences diverge sharply. In Poland, the CT underwent rapid and systemic capture. Within months of the 2015 elections, the institution traversed the distance from paralysis to functional subordination to the executive, culminating in its collapse as an independent adjudicatory body, a conclusion endorsed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in December 2025. In the United States, the process has been slower and more layered, driven by the ideological screening of nominees, the manipulation of Senate procedures, and the gradual dismantling of informal norms of restraint. Nevertheless, the sociological dimension of the Court's legitimacy is being meaningfully eroded. The paper concludes that the stability of constitutional courts depends not only on formal institutional design but on the political culture and shared norms of restraint among the elites who operate them. The capture of constitutional courts does not require the abolition of legal forms, only their subversion.