![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
With democratic backsliding spreading globally, international courts increasingly find themselves serving as democratic guardrails. This task poses a challenge, as national governments may attempt to punish international courts for trying to constrain their backsliding agendas. Since a government’s calculus for attacking a court is likely influenced by public opinion, we consider the impact of partisanship on the extent of public support for backlash against international courts in backsliding democracies. We theorise that support for backlash is driven by more than partisanship alone. For government partisans, support for backlash decreases with support for the international organisation to which the court belongs, while for opposition partisans it depends on their commitment to the democratic norms the court’s decision defends. We support our expectations by analysing original survey data collected from Hungary in March 2022, immediately following a major pro-democracy decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The CJEU is made up of two courts: the Court of Justice and the General Court.
References to the CJEU here are to the Court of Justice unless otherwise stated.
2 By backlash we follow the conceptualization proposed by Voeten (Citation2020, 408): ‘government actions that aim to curb or reverse the authority of an international court.’ Such backlash is conceptually distinct from noncompliance with a court’s rulings, as it takes the form of general court curbing mechanisms (Clark Citation2011). It can target a court’s general authority, a court’s authority over a single country, and, most powerfully, takes the form of a country leaving a court’s jurisdiction (Voeten Citation2020).
3 Case C-156/21 and C-157/21; the Polish government also challenged the policy. Notably, the CJEU had found Hungary and Poland to have violated democratic standards in previous cases addressing judicial independence (Bayer Citation2022c).
4 The survey was fielded in partnership with YouGov; see appendix for technical details.
5 By one count (as of July 2023), since 2012 Hungary has been involved in at least 16 such cases at the CJEU and another 11 at the ECtHR (Meijers Committee CitationN.d.).
6 Other options included ‘immigration and refugee policy’ (7%); ‘European Union’ (6%); ‘Environment and Climate Change’ (3%); ‘Coronavirus Pandemic’ (2%); ‘Other’ (3%).
7 Nonetheless, as we note later in the paper we are cautious here about making concrete claims of causality. Rather, we see these factors related to the timing and context of our study as buttressing the validity of our measures and subsequent observational analyses.
8 Before our questions about the decisions, we told respondents ‘ … as you may know, the European Court of Justice recently issued a ruling that allows the European Union to withhold funds from Hungary for flouting democratic standards.’ We then asked respondents first about their familiarity with the decision and then whether they supported or opposed the decision; we include these as control variables in our analyses. See appendix for full wording of key questions used in our analyses.
9 Voeten (Citation2020) finds 28 episodes of backlash against international courts, of which 20 either involved exiting a court’s jurisdiction or threatening to do so.
10 Our survey responses conform with that expectation, with only 18% strongly or somewhat opposed to continuing to accept the CJEU’s jurisdiction compared to 44% strongly or somewhat supportive of doing so; 38% neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement.
11 The governing Fidesz party is formally in a coalition with a minor party, the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP). However, Fidesz is by far the dominant party with the KDNP often considered a satellite party. In addition, the far-right party Mi Hazank ran in the 2022 election.
12 In the run-up to the election, the United Opposition changed its official name to United for Hungary; we do not have any immediate reason to believe the difference in name caused confusion for respondents.
13 In all, 782 chose Fidesz, 804 the United Opposition, and 378 neither. We present analyses in the appendix that include those who chose neither party.
14 The percentage of respondents selecting this option is noted after each pair of statements.
15 Our results are robust to the exclusion of those respondents who had not heard of the decision; see appendix for details and results.
16 A majority (83%) chose one of the first two options; 13% chose the third option.
17 This includes those whose education stopped at or before secondary school, as well as those who completed vocational training.
18 To account for potential concerns regarding how the distribution of our support variables might influence the results of our interaction models (Hainmueller, Mummolo and Xu Citation2019), we demonstrate in the appendix that our findings are robust to using trichotomous versions of these measures.
19 While we do not use survey weights in the analyses presented here, we do report in the appendix robustness analyses in which we include survey weights.
20 The standard deviation for Support for Backlash is 0.295.
21 The 95% CI bands diverge at approximately one standard deviation below the mean value of Democratic Values.
22 Such dynamics and the salience of cases might similarly influence aspects of the judicial process such as case promotion, salience, and chamber assignment (Krehbiel Citation2016; Dederke Citation2022; Cheruvu and Krehbiel Citation2022).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sivaram Cheruvu
Sivaram Cheruvu is an Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Texas at Dallas.
Jay N. Krehbiel
Jay N. Krehbiel is an Associate Professor of Political Science, West Virginia University.
Samantha Mussell
Samantha Mussell is an undergraduate student, University of Texas at Dallas.