The Illusion of Merit-Based Judicial Selection in Post-Communist Judiciary: Evidence from Slovakia

ABSTRACT

Judges all around the world, including in post-communist Europe, have become increasingly involved in the administration of judiciaries. Judicial self-governance is believed to secure greater judicial independence and merit-based decision-making regarding judicial careers. This article analyzes 126 examples of selection procedures at Slovak district courts that were held between 2012 and 2015 and finds that judge-dominated selection committees prefer candidates who can be expected to replicate the existing system. Candidates’ social and judicial cultural capital, either knowing someone in the selection committee or having a family member working as a judge, serve as vehicles for such preferences.

Acknowledgments

The author owes thanks to numerous commenters on the various draft of the paper, particularly Chris Hanretty (Royal Holloway, University of London), to members of the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, and to members of the Judicial Studies Institute (JUSTIN) at Masaryk University.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This did not just include introducing judicial councils, as some countries continue to let the political branches play a central role, at least formally (Blisa, Papoušková, and Urbániková 2018).

2. For instance, the Recommendation on the Independence, Efficiency and the Role of Judges adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in 1994 states that: “[a]ll decisions concerning professional career of judges should be based on objective criteria, and the selection and career of judges should be based on merit” and should be conducted by an authority “independent of the government and the administration.”

3. The selection process was eventually changed in 2017 to a so-called collective selection procedure which was removed from the hands of district courts to regional courts, which now centrally conduct selection procedures for the whole region (Spáč, Šipulová, and Urbániková 2018, 1756).

4. Data as well as R code used in the analysis are available upon request from the author.

Additional information

Funding

The research leading to this article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant no. 678375- JUDI-ARCH-ERC-2015-STG).