Public trust in the European legal systems: independence, accountability and awareness

Abstract

Two findings stand out in the literature on public attitudes vis-à-vis courts. The first is that judicial independence increases public trust. The second is that ‘to know courts is to love them’. In this study, these stylised facts are used as a starting point to ask three questions. First, is there also a role for judicial accountability in fostering public trust, above and beyond that played by independence? Second, could it be that only the most aware citizens are sensitive to such properties of the judicial system? Third, is the notion that ‘to know courts is to love them’ limited to systems with high levels of judicial independence and accountability? Using recently available macro-level indicators of judicial independence and accountability and the high-quality survey data collected by the European Social Survey in 32 countries throughout more than a decade, this study provides evidence that the answers to these questions are positive.

Keywords:

• Trust in courts
• judicial independence
• judicial accountability
• awareness

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Aylin Aydin-Çakır and Michael J. Nelson for their helpful and stimulating suggestions and to Madison Macy Burns and Constance McKinnon for their research assistance. We also benefited from comments by two anonymous referees and by participants at ICS’s SPARC seminar (ICS-ULisbon), at the SAMPOL staff seminar (University of Bergen), and at the MPSA 2019 CwC on Public Support for Comparative Judicial Institutions. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In Italy, such increased insulation has also led to professional breaches of competence and offenses being, for decades, routinely ignored, while civil liability mechanisms were rendered ineffective by both omission and commission on the part of judges themselves (Benvenuti 2018). Similarly, in Eastern Europe, the dismantling of mechanisms of political control inherited from the Communist regimes led to widely divergent outcomes in terms of ensuring the accountability of judges in countries such as Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Poland, or Romania (Parau 2009; Popova 2012; Kosař 2016).

2 Nevertheless, for some high courts (Gibson et al. 1998; Gibson and Caldeira 2009), the assumption of widespread public ignorance can also be misguided.

3 See Online Appendix for information about all variables employed.

4 TV exposure, rather than newspaper or radio exposure to news, was the only question of the sort posed in all ESS1-7 surveys.

5 All these eight measures are based either on expert or official assessments (for most cases) and, in one of them, on business community surveys. For a detailed discussion, see Ríos-Figueroa and Staton (2014) and Linzer and Staton (2015).

6 We employed the marhis Stata module conceived by Hernández (2016).

7 An additional indication is the fact that, in relation to reduced versions of models 8 and 10 (without the interaction term between LJI and JI and News media exposure), we cannot reject the hypothesis that there is no significant difference between models 8 and 10 and those reduced versions (using LR tests). We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

This article was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within the project UID/SOC/50013/2019.

Notes on contributors

Nuno Garoupa

Nuno Garoupa is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. His research interests include law and economics, comparative judicial politics and empirical legal studies. He has published in numerous leading economics, political science and law journals. His recent book is Judicial Reputation: A Comparative Study, with Tom Ginsburg (Chicago University Press, 2015). [[email protected]; Twitter: @NGaroupa]

Pedro C. Magalhães

Pedro C. Magalhães is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. His research interests include public opinion, elections and empirical legal studies. He has published in numerous leading political science journals. [[email protected]; Twitter: @PCMagalhaes].