Abstract
Given the lack of unambiguously constitutional foundations, Spain’s Constitutional Court (TC) has being playing a leading role in building the regulatory framework of the Autonomic State. This paper analyses whether this function is sufficient to explain the level of agreement among TC justices when adopting their resolutions, and in particular, on reaching unanimous rulings. If so, the legalist/federalist model would be a more adequate model to explain the behaviour of TC justices than the other models proposed in the literature on judicial behaviour: the attitudinal and the strategic models. A database has been constructed for this purpose with the 390 positive conflicts of competence between the central government and the autonomous communities resolved by the TC from 1981 to 2017, which have been used to estimate various explanatory models of unanimous rulings. The results obtained show the importance of the legalist/federalist model when attempting to explain unanimity in the Court’s pronouncements, but they also offer evidence that there are other factors that also influence the level of agreement among TC justices, remarkably the ideological ones.
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Notes
As stated in Article 233 of the Judiciary Power Act (Ley Orgánica del Poder Judicial), applicable to TC´s proceedings.
A figure that seems to be stable throughout time (Magalhães 2002).
On the role played by the Spanish TC, see the recent work of Pérez de los Cobos Orihuel (2017), former TC President (2013–2017).
So far, just three justices were not either Professors or Justices.
The “negative conflict of competence” occurs when the CG (the AC) declines competence to resolve any claim, considering that the competence corresponds to an AC (to the CG or another AC): See Articles 68-72 LOTC. According to the Annual Report of the TC, between 1995 and 2017 only 8 negative conflicts were resolved by the TC.
For a deeper explanation of conflicts of competence and actions of unconstitutionality, see Muñoz Machado (2007: 377 et seq.).
Conflicts shown as filed by “both” correspond to appeals independently brought by the CG and the ACs and accrued by the TC. That occurs when different appeals share sufficient legal features that make them suitable for a single ruling (ex art. 83 LOTC).
The Basque government decided not to appeal to the Constitutional Court from 1990 to 2002. See García Roca (2004: 45).
We thank a referee for suggesting us this interpretation.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are very grateful to two referees of the Journal for very useful suggestions that have helped them to improve the paper. They also thank the Government of Aragon and the European Regional Development Fund (Public Economics Research Group) and the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Project ECO2016-76506-C4-3-R (Julio López-Laborda) for their funding. A version of this paper was presented at a workshop organised by the Spanish Constitutional Court in Madrid on March 21, 2018, at the 9th Conference of the Spanish Association of Law and Economics, Lérida, Spain, June 28–29, 2018, and at the 26th Public Economics Meeting, Oviedo, Spain, January 24–25, 2019. The authors gratefully acknowledge Mercedes Serrano, Nuno Garoupa and the participants in the three conferences for their comments.
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López-Laborda, J., Rodrigo, F. & Sanz-Arcega, E. Consensus and dissent in the resolution of conflicts of competence by the Spanish Constitutional Court: the role of federalism and ideology. Eur J Law Econ 48, 305–330 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-019-09631-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-019-09631-8