06/10/25 - Populist attitudes about Curbing Constitutional Courts in Germany, Israel, and the United States

Populists fundamentally distrust liberal democracies and their institutions. An important unanswered question is whether populists' distrust extends to constitutional courts? If so, does populists' distrust stem from their unhappiness with judicial decisions or a more general rejection of the authority of constitutional courts? Finally, do populists view constitutional courts just as they evaluate national parliaments?

We investigate these questions based on survey experiments conducted in fall 2023 in Germany, Israel, and the U.S. Not only do these countries differ on a range of institutions, social and political divisions, but the contexts include the highly politicized conflicts over the judicature's authority in Israel to the fairly low politicization of the Bundesverfassungsgericht in Germany, with the debates over the Supreme Court in the US occupying a position somewhere in-between the two more extreme cases. Despite this variation, we find similar patterns at the individual level: populists not only spurn national parliaments but also hold constitutional courts in contempt as a matter of principle, regardless of judicial decisions issued, respondents' partisanship, and other characteristics.

Speaker: Robert Rohrschneider (University of Kansas)
Chair and discussants: Ramona Coman (IEE-ULB) & Cecilia Rizcallah (UCLouvain Saint-Louis & IEE-ULB)