The Spanish Constitutional Court

This chapter explores the judicial politics of the Spanish Constitutional Court focusing on both the internal and external aspects of its decisions – including majority decisions and dissenting opinions – and how they impact the national legislature. By adopting the ruling instead of the decision as the unit of analysis, this work intends to contribute to the literature in two aspects. First, it analyzes the constitutive elements of decisions made by the SCC en banc, focusing not only on the direction of the provision but also on other elements that improve our understanding of the strength of the SCC as a constitutional court. Second, the chapter also empirically explores the patterns of dissenting opinions in the SCC in the last 30 years, identifying clusters of dissenting justices. One of the main conclusions of this chapter is that the systematic weakness of SCC rulings corresponds to its political nature and to the fact that several aspects of SCC behaviour can be well explained by political factors.