Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
What role do courts play in the establishment and maintenance of constitutional democracies? To address this question, we elaborate a model that draws on existing substantive literature and on theories that assume strategic behavior on the part of judges, executives, and legislatures. This model, in turn, leads to several behavioral predictions about the interactions among the relevant political actors. Although those predictions could be assessed in many distinct contexts, we focus on Russia. In particular, we provide a demonstration of how the model helps make sense of the behavior of the Constitutional Court (Konstitucjonnyj sud) in light of the difficult political situation it confronted. We conclude with some thoughts on the broader implications of our theory for the study of courts throughout Eastern Europe and how it may well illuminate constitutional politics in other parts of the world.
We presented an earlier version of this article at the 2000 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C. We thank the Center for New Institutional Social Science for its support of our research; James L. Gibson, Thomas Remington, Kim Lane Scheppele, Pablo Spiller, Jennifer Widner, and participants at the Law, Politics, and Economics Seminar at NYU Law School, especially John Ferejohn, Barry Friedman, and Lewis Kornhauser, for their helpful suggestions; and the editor of the Law & Society Review and the three anonymous reviewers for their detailed critiques.