Explaining Media Coverage of Constitutional Court Decisions in Germany: The Role of Case Characteristics

ABSTRACT

Research on the media coverage of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court has revealed that the newsworthiness of a court decision – as determined by specific case characteristics – influences the likelihood that the decision will be covered by the media. However, in the context of European constitutional courts, media coverage of court decisions can be understood to be a form of justice reporting that focuses on general public interest and is operationalized by case characteristics that indicate the newsworthiness of the decisions. Using the case of the German Federal Constitutional Court, the determining factors behind whether court decisions are featured in the German media (i.e., that they receive media coverage in at least one newspaper article) are expounded. A local text alignment measurement of court decisions and newspaper articles enables media coverage to be identified based on original data on 3,404 decisions and 9,436 newspaper articles from between 2008 and 2018. The results demonstrate that media coverage of the German Court is not affected by declarations of unconstitutionality, though coverage is more likely when a decision is accompanied by a press release, an oral hearing, a dissenting opinion, or a combination of all three items. As these decisional aspects are the prerogative of the FCC, the results demonstrate that the German Constitutional Court has the necessary instruments to independently influence media coverage.

KEYWORDS:

• Judicial politics
• constitutional courts
• political communication
• newsworthiness

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1784329.

Acknowledgments

Without the helpful tips and guidance from Christoph Hönnige, Philipp Köker, and Dominic Nyhuis, this paper probably would not have been written. I thank you. I am also very grateful to Christoph Garwe, Martin Oertzen, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for improving this paper. I would also like to thank Nina, Monika and Norbert Meyer, Rabea Deem, and Katrin Aschmann for their moral support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data Availability Statement

The data, R syntax, and codebook are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/HFY4K

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/HFY4K.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The FCC has the competence to overrule a lower court decision either through a concrete review or a constitutional complaint, which are among the most important proceeding types for the Court (Brouard & Hönnige, 2017).

2. Unfortunately, this study does not consider the potential effect of issue areas or the potential political interest of third-party actors on media coverage. First, studies on the U.S. Supreme Court have shown that certain policy areas are more newsworthy than others. However, studies on the FCC have used rather broad and unsatisfactorily operationalized categories of policy issues (Krehbiel, 2016; Vanberg, 2005). Aside from these data-driven problems, we additionally lack a proper theoretical understanding of the effect of policy issues on FCC decisions. Second, within the U.S. context, the interests of third-party actors in a case (amicus briefs) are an important factor in explaining media coverage (Vining & Marcin, 2014). Nevertheless, amicus briefs are common in the American case yet rather uncommon for the FCC, which needs to explicitly invite actors to write an opinion (Vanberg, 2005). Furthermore, systematic data do not exist.

3. For an overview of the Court’s structure, composition, jurisdiction, caseload, argument structure, and key issues, see Hailbronner and Martini (2017).

4. Die Welt, Der Tagesspiegel, Frankfurter Rundschau, die tageszeitung (taz).

5. Die Zeit, Welt am Sonntag, Jüdische Allgemeine.

6. Bayern, Baden-Württemberg, Bremen, Hamburg, Hessen, Niedersachsen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Rheinland-Pfalz, Schleswig-Holstein.

7. For instance, on December 18, 2018, the FCC ruled on a case on automatic license-plate recognition by the police (1 BvR 142/15). The decision was not reported in the media until the Court officially published it on its website on February 5, 2019, along with a press release.

8. Similar methods have been used by Haselmayer et al. (2017) to analyze the media usage of press releases by political parties in Austria and by Wilkerson et al. (2015) to examine how bills borrow text passages from earlier draft laws.

9. A detailed description of the data-gathering- and variable-creation process is available upon request.

10. Due to the secrecy of judicial deliberations, the Court did not explicitly report the judges’ voting behavior. Decisions either report unanimity or they or they do not specifically address the judge’s voting behavior. Accordingly, decisions for which unanimity is not explicitly mentioned by the Court are coded as non-unanimous decisions.

11. Dissenting opinions were correctly characterized in the theory section as both outcome-related and procedural. However, for simplicity’s sake, dissents are listed here only under procedural characteristics.

12. The robustness checks are reported in Appendices B & C (available as online supplementary material).

13. In greater detail, the effects for oral hearings and dissents are slightly stronger, and the declaration of unconstitutionality variable becomes statistically significant at the 10% level. However, because the AIC for the model without press releases increases to 1,303.9, the model fit is weaker. The results are reported in Appendix D (available as online supplementary material).

14. For example, major differences occur for the considered courts (State Supreme Courts (Vining & Wilhelm, 2010) or the SCOTUS (Collins & Cooper, 2015; Sill et al., 2013; Strother, 2017)), the number of newspapers (New York Times (Sill et al., 2013), three or four major daily national newspapers (Collins & Cooper, 2015; Strother, 2017), or all major daily newspapers in the U.S. states (Vining & Wilhelm, 2010)), and the research periods (three years (Vining & Wilhelm, 2010) or more than 50 years (Collins & Cooper, 2015; Sill et al., 2013; Strother, 2017)).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Philipp Meyer

Philipp Meyer is a Research Associate and Teaching Fellow in the research group Comparative Government and German Politics at the Department of Political Science, Leibniz University Hannover. He has studied Political Science and History at the University of Greifswald (B.A.) as well as Political Science at the University of Bamberg (M.A.). Mr. Meyer is currently working on his Ph.D. thesis on judicial public relations at the German Federal Constitutional Court. His research interests include comparative judicial politics, policy agendas, and political communication.