This chapter stresses the importance of smart idealism, and outlines how global public opinion – and all of us – can play a crucial role. We cannot simply rely on our politicians to “do the right thing,” as either of the two components of smart idealism may be missing. Ideological bias may result in policies falling short of being smart or failing to be idealist, namely when politicians’ incentives are distorted. Electoral terms typically of four years result in a bias towards short-run policies (at the detriment of the lengthy, but crucial task of building peace), and often there are personal benefits for politician when cutting shady deals with despots. To get the incentives right, public pressure must ensure that the reelection chances of our politicians crucially depend on fostering peace at home and abroad. If voters care about this, then politicians will as well – whether out of intrinsic motivation or just to get reelected. As shown in this chapter, recent evidence highlights that scrutiny and attention from the world press and the public at large is a powerful rampart against repression.

Newspapers as the main media of political coverage continue to be primary outlets for reports and opinions on collectively binding decisions. Following a quantitative research strategy, this chapter introduces a new methodological approach that allows us to systematically capture media attention and public salience of court decisions. It provides insight into a new dataset for newspaper coverage of more than 4,000 CJEU decisions in eight EU quality newspapers. The chapter describes the data collection process, the structure of the data, and the opportunities for quantitative analysis. Moreover, it emphasizes the general applicability of this methodological approach for a large number of court cases across a longer time period. The collected data offers new insights into media attention to CJEU cases and various opportunities for future analysis. The contribution also reflects on limitations, strengths, and weaknesses of this quantitative approach of studying the CJEU, compared to other approaches presented in the volume.