Judicial governance is becoming one of the central topics of political discussion in
many European countries. In Spain, the renewal of members of the Consejo General
del Poder Judicial-the Spanish judicial council-has in the last years become one
of the main elements of tension between government and opposition. Until recently,
Finland was an outlier in the Nordic context, but the creation of the National Court
Administration has recently ended this situation. In Poland, judicial governance is at
the core of a process of rule of law deterioration which has been thoroughly analysed
in the academic literature.1
All these cases, though radically different from one another, have something in
common. They show the importance that mechanisms for judicial governance are
acquiring in contemporary European democracies. They illustrate that these mechanisms
are integrated into power dynamics between government and opposition,
between branches of government, and even between the national and supranational
levels of governance. Contemporary European democracies, both when they are
healthy and when they decay, cannot be understood anymore without analysing the
role played by institutions such as judicial councils and courts services. This book is
precisely about judicial goverance and its relationship with democracy as a system of
government.
More specifically, this book investigates the relationship between judicial governance
and democratic quality. It seeks to make a contribution to our understanding
of how different designs of judicial governance relate to the quality of democracy in
European countries. Relying on a dataset of 46 European countries, the book uses
different methodological tools to investigate this relationship. The analysis underlines
the complexity of the relationship between judicial governance and democratic
quality in Europe. Such relationships are nuanced, and often differ from country to
country..
