Constitutional Politics and the Judiciary Decision-making in Central and Eastern Europe Routledge Research in Constitutional Law Series

Recent confrontations between constitutional courts and parliamentary majorities, for example in Poland and Hungary, have attracted international interest in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature in Central and Eastern European countries. Several political actors have argued that courts have assumed too much power after the democratic transformation process in 1989/1990. These claims are explicitly or implicitly connected to the charge that courts have constrained the room for manoeuvre of the legislatures too heavily and that they have entered the field of politics. Nevertheless, the question to what extent has this aggregation of power constrained the dominant political actors has never been examined accurately and systematically in the literature. The present volume fills this gap by applying an innovative research methodology to quantify the impact and effect of court?s decisions on legislation and legislators, and measure the strength of judicial decisions in six CEE countries.

1: Introduction - Kálmán Pócza; 2: Research methodology - Kálmán Pócza and Gábor Dobos; 3: The Czech Constitutional Court: Far away from political influence - Katarína Šipulová; 4: The German Federal Constitutional Court: Authority transformed into power? - Oliver W. Lembcke; 5: The Hungarian Constitutional Court: A constructive partner in constitutional dialogue - Kálmán Pócza, Gábor Dobos and Attila Gyulai; 6: The Polish Constitutional Tribunal: Deference beyond the veil of activism - Artur Wołek and Iga Kender-Jeziorska; 7: The Romanian Constitutional Court: Muddling through democratic transition - Csongor Kuti; 8: The Slovak Constitutional Court: The third legislator? - Erik Láštic and Max Steuer; 9: Courts compared: The practice of constitutional adjudication in Central and Eastern Europe - Kálmán Pócza, Gábor Dobos and Attila Gyulai;

Kálmán Pócza is senior research fellow at the Institute for Political Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and associate professor at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University Budapest. He is the Principal Investigator of the JUDICON research project (www.judicon.tk.mta.hu).