TY - JOUR
T1 - The Institutional Foundations of the Uneven Global Spread of Constitutional Courts
AU - Kim, Dongwook
AU - Nolette, Paul
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2023.
PY - 2024/3/1
Y1 - 2024/3/1
N2 - Since the third wave of democratization, specialized constitutional courts have spread widely across developed and developing countries and become key to government accountability, rights protection, and cross-institutional conflict resolution. Simultaneously, nearly half of all constitutional court adoptions have occurred in Europe. What explains the global, yet Eurocentric, spread of constitutional courts? Countries’ institutional endowments, particularly domestic and international legal institutions, are key to this crucial choice of constitutional design. Common law countries are less likely to establish specialized constitutional courts than their civil law counterparts due to their domestic legal system’s relatively weaker affinity with the constitutional court model. Furthermore, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission—the main international organization specifically promoting constitutional courts—has catalyzed their wide and rapid spread especially, but not exclusively, in Europe. Our theory gains robust support from event history analyses of 172 developed and developing countries from 1947 to 2019.
AB - Since the third wave of democratization, specialized constitutional courts have spread widely across developed and developing countries and become key to government accountability, rights protection, and cross-institutional conflict resolution. Simultaneously, nearly half of all constitutional court adoptions have occurred in Europe. What explains the global, yet Eurocentric, spread of constitutional courts? Countries’ institutional endowments, particularly domestic and international legal institutions, are key to this crucial choice of constitutional design. Common law countries are less likely to establish specialized constitutional courts than their civil law counterparts due to their domestic legal system’s relatively weaker affinity with the constitutional court model. Furthermore, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission—the main international organization specifically promoting constitutional courts—has catalyzed their wide and rapid spread especially, but not exclusively, in Europe. Our theory gains robust support from event history analyses of 172 developed and developing countries from 1947 to 2019.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85167438238&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S1537592723002025
DO - 10.1017/S1537592723002025
M3 - Article
SN - 1537-5927
VL - 22
SP - 294
EP - 311
JO - Perspectives on Politics
JF - Perspectives on Politics
IS - 1
ER -