Mapping Courts and Cabinets: New Method Places Judges in the Same Policy Space as Executives

Why This Matters: Political scientists often compare policy preferences across elected actors, but non-majoritarian institutions—courts, independent agencies, and other unelected bodies—are harder to place on the same ideological or policy scales. Benjamin G. Engst, David M. Grundmanns, and Thomas Gschwend develop a new way to estimate where courts sit relative to executives, enabling direct comparison of judicial and governmental positions and a clearer view of interinstitutional conflict and cooperation.

The Core Idea: The authors propose a scaling approach that infers a court’s policy position for each decision by combining (a) the textual positions of political actors recorded in written statements tied to that decision and (b) the court’s actual decision outcome. This produces court scores that are directly comparable to scores for governments and other political actors without relying on individual justice votes or on assumptions that judges inherit nominees’ positions.

How It Works (Methods):

• Uses written statements by political actors associated with each court decision as anchoring signals of actor positions.
• Incorporates the court’s decision outcome to place the court in the same policy space as those actors for each case.
• Avoids two common practices in the literature: relying on justice-level roll-call-like votes and assuming justices’ preferences equal those of their nominators.

Applications and Validation:

• The method is applied to two cases: the German Federal Constitutional Court paired with successive German governments, and the European Court of Justice paired with various European governments.
• The authors validate the resulting common policy spaces, showing that the court scores align meaningfully with expectations about court–executive relations (details and diagnostics reported in the paper).

What This Enables: These comparable scores let researchers study dynamics such as shifts in court positions over time, alignment or divergence between courts and executives, and how institutional interactions shape policy outcomes. The approach provides a practical tool for integrating non-majoritarian actors into spatial models of politics while preserving case-level variation in judicial behavior.

Where To Look Next: The paper demonstrates the method’s promise with two European examples and offers a framework that can be adapted to other courts or non-majoritarian institutions where written actor statements and case outcomes are available.