An Empirical Analysis of Judicial Transformation in Turkey
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5081080 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ozan O Varol, Lucia Dalla Pellegrina (0000-0002-3648-7506, University of Milano-Bicocca), Nuno Garoupa (0000-0001-6792-0918, George Mason University) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 187-216 |
| Publication date | 2017-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Journal of Comparative Law (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-919X • E-ISSN: 2326-9197 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ajcl/avx013 |
| OpenAlex | W2298953588 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
Constitutional amendments in September 2010 restructured the Turkish Constitutional Court (TCC) by imposing term limits, adding six additional seats to the Court, and bolstering the role of the political branches in the appointments process. Numerous commentators have argued that the structural reforms amounted to court packing, influenced court decisions in substantive ways, and undermined the TCC’s ability to serve as an effective check on the political branches. But aside from speculation and normative analyses of isolated TCC decisions, there has been no systematic academic study on the consequences of the reforms. In this Article, we aim to fill this scholarly gap. By making use of an original dataset of 200 cases, randomly chosen for the period 2007–2014, we test the extent to which these reforms have changed judicial behavior. Our findings show a significant break in 2010 in the ideological position of the Court and detect a conservative ideological shift following the reforms that is increasing in magnitude over time. This shift, however, has not yet affected judicial outcomes in a statistically significant manner. We explain these results and discuss their implications.
Aside · Constitution · Constitutional court · Economics · Ideology · Judicial review · Law and economics · Normative · Political science · Politics · Position (finance) · Speculation · Turkish · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Public Administration and Governance · Turkey's Politics and Society
Democracy in Trouble
Court-packing and judicial manipulation
Judicial independence
Populist constitutional backsliding and judicial independence
Personalism and the Trajectories of Populist Constitutions
From activism to resilience
The New Politics of Judicial Appointments in Southern Africa
Authoritarian Legacies in Law and Democratic Backsliding
Judicial transformation
Mixed Judicial Selection and Constitutional Review
Populist governments, judicial independence, and public trust in the courts
The varying effect of court-curbing
On motives and means
The light and the dark side of judicial resistance
Judicial transformation in a competitive authoritarian regime
| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,14 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2025 (7) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 15 |