Jay N. Krehbiel’s research while affiliated with University at Buffalo, State University of New York and other places

International courts are increasingly serving as bulwarks of democracy. These courts, however, often depend on the cooperation of the very governments they seek to hold accountable, exposing them to potential retaliation for attempting to constrain their behavior. As governments’ response to adverse decision-making is often conditional on public support, we explore whether citizens actually support international courts’ judicial power over questions of democracy. We argue that citizens’ support for this form of judicial power depends on their democratic values and their desire for institutional checks and balances against the executive. Furthermore, we contest that this support is conditional on partisanship, with this relationship holding for opposition partisans while government partisans are generally opposed to international courts’ judicial power. We support our expectations using original survey data collected from Hungary before their 2022 national legislative elections, and examining citizens’ support for judicial power for the Court of Justice of the European Union.

A growing body of research theorizes that partisanship can undermine democracy as citizens prioritize their political interests over abstract norms and values. We argue that crises might counteract intense partisanship by giving citizens clarity on the threats posed by rule of law violations. Examining the differential application of a law – a breach of democratic norms – we draw on an experiment embedded in representative surveys of Germany, the United States, Hungary and Poland to examine citizens’ sense of appropriate punishment for elites’ violation of a municipal mask‐wearing ordinance. We find evidence of partisan bias in citizens’ willingness to support punishment in all four countries. But, in the two consolidated democracies, we find that concern about the Covid‐19 crisis diminishes partisan biases in punishment preferences: citizens who are most concerned about the crisis also model the most consistency in their willingness to hold copartisans into account.

Explanations for the successful expansion and consolidation of the European Union and its legal system have long emphasized the importance of domestic courts’ sending preliminary references to the Court of Justice. Key to many of these theoretical accounts is the claim that domestic courts are better equipped than the Court of Justice to compel national governments to comply with EU law. Integrating insights from the comparative judicial politics literature into the context of the EU's preliminary references system, we provide a theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim by arguing that incorporating domestic courts into the EU legal process enhances public support for expansive judicial interpretations of EU law. We go on to argue, however, that this transfer of legitimacy depends on citizens’ views of the national and European courts. We support our argument with evidence from a preregistered survey experiment fielded in Germany.

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The political actors who make policy often delegate their implementation to others. Yet for a variety of reasons, ranging from intransigence to incompetence, political agents tasked with implementation may not faithfully implement policies. If those charged with implementation can frame their noncompliance in a way that engenders sympathy, implementors may be able to disrupt the policymaking process with limited public backlash. We examine if the public's willingness to excuse noncompliance varies with the implementing actor's rationale for its failing to carry out the policy. Drawing on a survey experiment fielded in Germany, we find that the public is more sympathetic to resource-based, rather than principled, justifications for noncompliance, though the size of the effect is small. Further, contrary to fears that the pandemic would decay democratic functioning by leading citizens to be more forgiving of emergency-based inaction, we find no evidence that the public is more accepting of noncompliance justified on the base of the pandemic.

A long tradition in political science holds that political institutions are designed for the benefit of the politicians who create them. Prominent among explanations for the creation and maintenance of effective judiciaries is the political insurance theory, which predicts higher levels of judicial independence where there is robust political competition. In this article, I consider the implications of political insurance theory for one of the most consequential organizational decisions for courts, the provision of panels or subsets of judges for rendering decisions. Identifying the ability of panels to provide political insurance, I contend that higher levels of political competition motivate the creation of panel systems in national high courts. An empirical analysis using an original dataset on the organic statutes of 106 high courts reveals a positive relationship between political competition and the use of panel systems, while further analysis shows that this relationship is limited to democracies.

Courts regularly delegate tasks to individual or small subsets of judges. While a substantial literature addresses delegation in the context of American courts, less is known about why and how courts delegate from a comparative perspective. With many of the world’s high courts using panel systems (also known as “chambers”) by which the court delegates cases to subsets of judges, this limitation of the extant literature leaves a number of empirical and theoretical questions unanswered. We argue that the threat of noncompliance presents one factor influencing a court’s delegation of cases to panels. From our expectation that a court will not delegate cases with a greater risk for noncompliance to panels, we then derive empirical implications for case disposition and a court’s willingness to rule contrary to the legal merits in a case. We analyze panel usage at the Court of Justice of the European Union to support our account.