The European Court System and Democratic Governance

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Judicial governance is becoming one of the central topics of political discussion in many European countries. In Spain, the renewal of members of the Consejo General del Poder Judicial-the Spanish judicial council-has in the last years become one of the main elements of tension between government and opposition. Until recently, Finland was an outlier in the Nordic context, but the creation of the National Court Administration has recently ended this situation. In Poland, judicial governance is at the core of a process of rule of law deterioration which has been thoroughly analysed in the academic literature.1 All these cases, though radically different from one another, have something in common. They show the importance that mechanisms for judicial governance are acquiring in contemporary European democracies. They illustrate that these mechanisms are integrated into power dynamics between government and opposition, between branches of government, and even between the national and supranational levels of governance. Contemporary European democracies, both when they are healthy and when they decay, cannot be understood anymore without analysing the role played by institutions such as judicial councils and courts services. This book is precisely about judicial goverance and its relationship with democracy as a system of government. More specifically, this book investigates the relationship between judicial governance and democratic quality. It seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of how different designs of judicial governance relate to the quality of democracy in European countries. Relying on a dataset of 46 European countries, the book uses different methodological tools to investigate this relationship. The analysis underlines the complexity of the relationship between judicial governance and democratic quality in Europe. Such relationships are nuanced, and often differ from country to country..