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Judicial Impartiality and Independence in Divided Societies: An Empirical Analysis of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Alex Schwartz  and
Melanie Janelle Murchison
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Abstract

The role of constitutional courts in deeply divided societies is complicated by the danger that the salient societal cleavages may influence judicial decision-making and, consequently, undermine judicial impartiality and independence. With reference to the decisions of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article investigates the influence of ethno-national affiliation on judicial behaviour and the extent to which variation in judicial tenure amplifies or dampens that influence. Based on a statistical analysis of an original dataset of the Court's decisions, we find that the judges do in fact divide predictably along ethno-national lines, at least in certain types of cases, and that these divisions cannot be reduced to a residual loyalty to their appointing political parties. Contrary to some theoretical expectations, however, we find that long-term tenure does little to dampen the influence of ethno-national affiliation on judicial behaviour. Moreover, our findings suggest that this influence may actually increase as a judge acclimates to the dynamics of a divided court. We conclude by considering how alternative arrangements for the selection and tenure of judges might help to ameliorate this problem.

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Law & Society Review , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 821 - 855
Copyright
© 2016 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This article was published online on 7 November 2016. An error was subsequently identified. This notice is included in the online and print versions to indicate that both have been corrected 10 November 2016.

Research for this article was facilitated by a British Academy-Leverhulme grant. We presented earlier versions of our findings at annual meetings of the American Political Science Association (2014, Washington, DC) and the International Political Science Association (2014, Montreal). We thank Ganimete Asllani-Price for her research assistance and Damir Banović, David Feldman, Nedim Kulenović, Joseph Marko, Christopher McCrudden, Brendan O'Leary, and Zoran Oklopcic for their helpful comments and insight. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Christopher Raymond for his very generous advice and constructive criticism. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for helping us to improve the analysis considerably. Any errors are entirely our own.

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