Title:      An Ecological Item-Response Model for Multiple
Subsets of Respondents with Application to the European Court of
Justice

Authors:    Michael Malecki

Entrydate:  2009-07-30 16:19:12

Keywords:   ideal point estimation, item response, judicial
politics, ecological inference, hierarchical model

Abstract:   The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has fostered the
development of a common European legal order, and in doing so,
has asserted itself and its supremacy more, and more
successfully, than any other international court. It has
maintained features of international courts such as its
composition of one judge per member state, while employing other
tools of national high courts such as en banc decisions and
organization into chambers, that together hide internal dissent
and shield the ECJ from direct monitoring or curbing by the
member states. The same shield has frustrated efforts to
quantify the court's responsiveness to member states, with
limited evidence that the ECJ yields to some member-state
interest some of the time, but nonetheless has advanced
integration beyond national governments' wishes. This
equivocation arises at least in part from a failure to include
relevant information about the court's composition and
organization. In fact, the six-year renewable terms of judges,
their previous qualifications and affiliations, and the internal
organization into chambers all provide prior information that can
and should be incorporated into a more complete model of judicial
behavior. I develop an extension of the well-studied
item-response model to infer judges' preferences, using the
structured ecological data from the cases they heard and
relevant prior information about judges and the national
governments that appoint them as well as information about
cases. I offer new, more rigorous tests for existing theoretical
hypotheses about the ECJ's deference to certain actors and
preference for integration. The model is applicable to other
settings of structured ecological data. Many other national and
international courts hear cases in subset chambers, and relevant
prior information should be included rather than ignored in
models of judicial behavior.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=929

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