ABSTRACT
To explore the diversity and measure the strength of judicial decisions, the JUDICON research project has elaborated a new methodology which is apt to give a more nuanced picture of the practice of constitutional adjudication in Central Europe. We present the details of this methodology in this chapter. After assessing the literature on the empirical analysis of judicial decisions (Section 2.1), we define the unit of observation, which is also quite different from common approaches to judicial decisions (Section 2.2). Since decisions of the constitutional courts might contain several rulings, we disaggregate all judicial decisions into rulings. Beyond this fundamental novelty, we also present the main components and elements, i.e. the building blocks of all judicial rulings, in Section 2.3. In a next step, we will deal with ruling types which are aggregations of different elements of judicial decisions into the categories of weak, average and strong forms of rulings (Section 2.4). Concerning the second research question on the extent courts have constrained legislature’s room for manoeuvre, we will introduce a scale based on certain fundamental principles that will serve as the starting point of the empirical analysis dealing with the strength of judicial rulings. Section 2.5 deals with the explanation of weighting the elements of judicial rulings. In Section 2.6, we clarify the methodology of analysing dissenting opinions and dissenting coalitions, and in the last section we deal with future research based on the JUDICON dataset the authors of the project are to conduct.
