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Title
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How courts decide federalism disputes: legal merit, attitudinal effects, and strategic considerations in the jurisprudence of the Belgian Constitutional Court
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Author
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Abstract
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| An urgent question in contemporary federal theory is how institutions impact upon the centralization grade of multi-tiered systems. This article focuses on constitutional courts as one of such institutions. It constructs a classification for measuring a courts position in federalism disputes and tests hypotheses about what determines variation across decisions within one court. The case study is Belgium, as a model of contemporary fragmenting systems. We find that if the defending party is the federal government, the probability of a centralist outcome increases compared to when a sub-state government is the defendant, and vice versa. Evidence suggests that legal merit plays a role to this effect. We further find that each state reform decreases the probability of a centralist outcome. This appears to be a consequence of strategic considerations. We finally find suggestive evidence that the organization of the court does not fully succeed in playing down judges' ideological preferences. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Publius : the journal of federalism
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Publication
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2019
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Volume/pages
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49
:4
(2019)
, p. 587-616
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ISI
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000492955400003
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Full text (Publisher's DOI)
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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