A supranational case: Comparing sources of support for constitutional courts

As the power of constitutional courts is increasing worldwide, we still know little about how support for emergent courts and especially for supranational courts develops. A common assumption which has not been empirically tested is that supranational courts face special legitimacy handicaps since they lack the "national presumption of legitimacy." This dissertation helps fill this gap by combining the statistical and the comparative methods to analyze the individual-level sources of support for constitutional courts in five cases. The comparison extends cross-nationally and cross-institutionally by contrasting public support for two well-established courts---the U.S. Supreme Court and the West German Federal Constitutional Court---to support for three emergent courts---the Federal Constitutional Court in East Germany and the European Court of Justice in both West and East Germany.; Employing David Easton's notion of an "interconnected support universe," the main source of diffuse support considered is support for other institutions of government. For the supranational European Court of Justice, the possibility of a transfer of support from the national to the supranational level is given special consideration. This transfer of support is theorized to occur through both cognitive and functional linkages between courts regardless of at which level of government they operate.; Ordinary least squares regression analysis of the data reveals that constitutional courts do indeed inhabit an interconnected support universe. In addition, there is evidence that support for national constitutional courts does indeed translate into support for constitutional courts at the supranational level. Overall, the similarity of the sources of support for these courts is more striking than the differences, suggesting that the European Court of Justice faces more legitimacy handicaps as a new court, not as a supranational tribunal. Where the court is unique is in its ability to benefit from a legitimacy transfer, i.e. from support for constitutional courts at the national level.