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Rewarding Judicial Independance: Evidence from the Italian Constitutional court

Author

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  • Nadia FIORINO

    (Dipartimento di Sistemi e Istituzioni per l’Economia, Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, Italy)

  • Nicolas GAVOILLE

    (CREM-CNRS and Condorcet Center, University of Rennes 1, France)

  • Fabio PADOVANO

    (CREM-CNRS and Condorcet Center, University of Rennes 1, France, Department of Political Sciences, University Roma Tre, Italy)

Abstract

We use data about the Italian Constitutional Court (1956-2005) to verify an implication of the “revisionist” explanations of judicial independence with respect to judicial appointments, namely that elected politicians reward more independent justices with appointments after the Court tenure. The empirical strategy is two-step. First, we estimate a logit fixed-effect model to evaluate the personal degree of independence for each Italian justice reporter. This “judge-effect” is based on the proneness of a judge to declare the constitutional illegitimacy of a law controlling for the environmental conditional phenomena. Second, we verify to what extent this degree of independence affects the probability of obtaining a politically controlled occupation after the end of the mandate at the Court. Our results, obtained by a variety of estimators to check their robustness, strongly support the revisionist view.

Suggested Citation

  • Nadia FIORINO & Nicolas GAVOILLE & Fabio PADOVANO, 2014. "Rewarding Judicial Independance: Evidence from the Italian Constitutional court," Economics Working Paper from Condorcet Center for political Economy at CREM-CNRS 2014-06-ccr, Condorcet Center for political Economy.
    • Handle: RePEc:tut:cccrwp:2014-06-ccr
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Judicial independence; revisionist view; post Court political appointments;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government

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