The Politics of Supranational Legal Integration

随着国际裁决机构，如人权法院、世界贸易组织和其他机构的增加，我们希望了解这些机构在多大程度上提供和维持独立于国家政府并高于国家政府的法律秩序。欧洲联盟(欧盟)法律的发展为探讨这些国际法和国家主权问题提供了宝贵的论坛。在过去的40年里，欧洲法院(ECJ)建立了一种高于国家法律的超国家法律秩序，各国政府受到这种秩序的约束。这种超国家的法律一体化引发了一场激烈的学术辩论，争论的焦点是欧洲法院是成员国的工具还是真正独立的司法机构。这个问题是我们提案的重点。现有的关于欧盟法律一体化政治的文献基本上分为两类。支持法院的阵营假设，欧洲法院可以执行其判决，其裁决限制了各国政府，并推动欧洲一体化超出了各国政府的意图。政府间主义阵营认为，欧洲法院对成员国负有责任，因此得出结论，成员国限制了法律一体化。这两个阵营之间的辩论很大程度上是基于关于政府与欧洲法院关系的非正式争论，这些争论模糊了理论辩论的基础。此外，经验证据在很大程度上由两个阵营提供相互矛盾解释的案例研究组成。因此，为了解决这场争论，拟议的项目提供：(A)对理论辩论进行更清晰的理论阐述，以便找出区分这两个阵营的可检验的假设；(B)对这些假设进行严格的实证分析。首先，该项目产生了两种政府与欧洲法院互动的正式模型背后的直觉及其影响，每一种模型都旨在将两种程度的非正式论点正式化，除了这两个传统阵营之外，正式模型还将最近关于公共合法性的争论纳入正式模型。结果表明，现有的经验证据并不区分相互竞争的理论。这些正式模型还产生了一套区分这两种立场的可检验的假设。然后，拟议的项目提供了一种数据收集和统计分析战略，以检验这些假设。政府间主义模型预测，遵守欧盟法律的政治成本应该会在以下五个方面影响欧洲法院的行为：(1)一个政府是否被裁定为不利；(2)一个政府被带上法庭的频率有多高；(3)欧洲法院是否努力将案件与可能形成优先地位的先前案件区分开来；(4)有多少法官在欧洲法院裁决小组中任职；以及(5)法官需要多长时间来裁决一个案件。政治成本的衡量既包括系统性因素，如距离必须举行选举的年限和执政党控制的席位数量，也包括随机的政治冲击，如政府在补选中落败或政治丑闻。这些测试中的前两个是详细介绍的，包括对数据的描述、它们的来源以及关于实际回归的统计问题。剩下的三个测试将简要介绍。这一分析有助于进一步展开一场关于欧洲法院在欧盟法律一体化中的角色的辩论，这场辩论本已卓有成效。分析不仅澄清和区分了现有的两个阵营，而且数据收集也有助于测试未来的理论发展。此外，分析结果对跨国机构一般约束国家政府的条件有影响，从而使我们对超国家裁决有了更广泛的理解。

As international adjudicating institutions, such as the Court of Human Rights, the World Trade Organization, and others, multiply, we want to understand to what degree these institutions provide and maintain a legal order independent of, and superior to, national governments. The development of European Union (EU) law provides a valuable forum in which to explore these issues of international laws and national sovereignty. Over the past forty years, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has established a supranational legal order superior to national law and to which national governments are subject. This supranational legal integration has generated a vigorous scholarly debate concerning whether the ECJ is a tool of the member states or a truly independent judiciary. This question is the focus of our proposal. The extant literature on the politics of EU legal integration divides essentially into two groups. The pro-Court camp assumes that the ECJ can enforce its judgments and that its rulings constrain national governments and push European integration beyond that intended by national governments. The Intergovernmentalist camp assumes that the ECJ is beholden to the member states and, thus, concludes that member states constrain legal integration. The debate between these two camps is based largely on informal arguments about government-ECJ relations, which obscure the basis of the theoretical debate. Also, the empirical evident consists largely of case studies over which the two camps offer conflicting interpretations. Thus, to resolve this debate, the proposed project provides: (a) a clearer theoretical exposition of the theoretical debate so as to identify testable hypotheses that discriminate between the two camps, and (b) a rigorous empirical analysis of these hypotheses. First, the project generates the intuition behind, and the implications of, two formal models of government-ECJ interaction, each of which is designed to formalize the two extent informal arguments, Beyond the two traditional camps, the formal models also integrate recent arguments about public legitimacy into the formal model. The results demonstrate that the extant empirical evidence does not discriminate between the competing theories. These formal models also generate a set of testable hypotheses that discriminate between the two positions. The proposed project then provides a strategy for data collection and statistical analysis to test these hypotheses. The Intergovernmentalist model predicts that the political costs of compliance with EU law should affect ECJ behavior in the following five ways: (1) whether a government is ruled against; (2) how frequently a government is taken to trial; (3) whether the ECJ makes an effort to distinguish a case from potentially precedence-forming previous cases; (4) how many judges sit on an ECJ-adjudicating panel; and (5) how long the judges take to decide a case. Political costs are measured through both systematic components, such as the number of years until an election must be called and the number of seats that the ruling party controls, and random political shocks, such as a government defeat in a by-election or a political scandal. The first two of these tests are presented in detail, including descriptions of the data, their sources, and statistical issues regarding the actual regressions. The remaining three tests are mentioned briefly. This analysis helps to further an already fruitful debate about the role of the ECJ in EU legal integration. Not only does the analysis clarify and discriminate between the two extant camps, but the data collections also facilitates tests of future theoretical developments. In addition, the results of the analysis have implications for the conditions under which transnational institutions in general constrain national governments and, thus, inform our broader understanding of supranational adjudication.