- Case Promotion and the Pursuit of Judicial Legitimacy: Evidence from the Court of Justice of the European Union.
    Abstract    
Legitimacy is typically viewed as critical for the efficacy of judicial institutions. As such, much attention has been devoted to how a court can gain a high level of public support. The received wisdom from this literature is that carefully increas- ing public exposure to judicial activities will engender positive perceptions of the judiciary that in turn can translate into institutional legitimacy. It is not immedi- ately clear, however, whether or not courts lacking strong public support actively attempt to affect public attention in order to build legitimacy. Moreover, it is fur- ther unclear what implications such a strategy would have for judicial behavior. I argue that legitimacy-seeking courts use public relations, specifically press releases, to gain support by considering the potential support gained from the relevant con- stituency in a case, the perceived procedural fairness of the process, and the risk of noncompliance. Using data on the press activities of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), I show that the court is more likely to promote cases when public trust in the CJEU is low in the defendant EU member state, the court had held a public oral hearing, and the risk of noncompliance is low.
    BibTeX Citation    
@article{Krehbiel_CJEU_PR,
title={Case Promotion and the Pursuit of Judicial Legitimacy: Evidence from the Court of Justice of the European Union},
author={Krehbiel, Jay N.},
journal={Unpublished Manuscript, West Virginia University},
year={2018}
}
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