CLE Vlog with Prof. Christoph Engel (Max Planck Bonn) on German Constitutional Courts
In the new vlog of the ETH Zurich Center for Law & Economics, Prof. Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn) and Prof. Stefan Bechtold (ETH Zurich) discuss Engel's recent study "The German Constitutional Court – Political, but not Partisan?".
The German Constitutional Court has powers that are no weaker than the powers of the US Supreme Court. Justices are openly selected by the political parties. Nonetheless, public and professional perception are strikingly different. Justices at the German court are not believed to be guided by the policy preferences of the nominating party.
In his paper "The German Constitutional Court – Political, but not Partisan?" (work in progress), Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute Bonn) uses the complete publicly available data to investigate whether this perception is well-founded. It exploits three independent sources of quasi-random variation to generate causal evidence. There is no smoking gun of ideological influence. Some specifications show, however, that justices nominated by the left-wing parties (SPD and the Greens) are more activist, even in domains where activism likely runs counter the ideological preferences of these parties.
In this vlog, Prof. Engel discusses his study with Prof. Stefan Bechtold from the ETH Zurich Center for Law & Economics (CLE).
