Contestation, Politicization, and the CJEU’s Public Relations Toolbox: Judgments of the Court of Justice of the EU in their Public and Political Context
EU politics has become an increasingly politicized environment in recent decades. This dissertation investigates how the EU’s highest court fares in this environment. Just like many other international courts, the CJEU gained power in recent decades. This development makes public and political attention and reactions more likely and bears the potential for contestation and politicization. Despite the importance of CJEU rulings, we have little to no systematic insight into their public salience and controversiality to date. The main aim of this dissertation is to identify under which conditions judicial procedures and decisions trigger reactions in the public and political environment of the CJEU. To address this aim, the dissertation poses several research questions: (1) Under which circumstances are governments mobilized to intervene in CJEU cases?; (2) Under which conditions do media report about CJEU decisions?; (3) How does the CJEU promote judgments through press releases and social media?; (4) Is it successful in doing so? The cumulative dissertation operationalizes and measures core components of contestation and politicization, and delivers empirical analyses of governmental and media attention to CJEU cases in quantitative research designs. It looks at the mobilization of actors in CJEU procedures (papers 1 and 2) and public and media attention to CJEU judgments (papers 3 and 4). Paper 1 reveals under which conditions EU governments intervene in CJEU procedures and delivers evidence that political preferences about legislative acts matter for conflicts in the EU’s judicial arena. The mobilization of EU governments and conflict among them also matters for the public communication efforts of the Court, as paper 2 can show. Paper 3 delivers empirical insights into new data on press coverage of more than 4,300 CJEU decisions in eight newspapers. The internet, digitalization, and the rise of online and social media have led to fundamental changes in the configuration of the public sphere. Therefore, paper 4 links data for the CJEU’s public communication with data on the public debate about the Court on Twitter. It reveals how the CJEU professionalized its communication strategies and how its messages influence the Twitter debate. Building on a variety of datasets and newly collected data, these findings deliver novel insights into public and political reactions to CJEU cases. They allow us to understand better, how the EU’s highest court fares in the deeply integrated and highly politicized setting EU politics has become. In sum, this dissertation shows that politicization matters for the Court and its judgments. Cases’ influence on domestic legislation, conflict among EU governments, the role of courts in domestic political systems, and public communication efforts of the Court have the strongest impact on the politicization of the CJEU
