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6 - Pushing the Limits: Party Finance Legislation and the Bundesverfassungsgericht

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2009

Georg Vanberg
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Summary

A central implication of the theory developed in Chapter 2 is that legislative majorities in the Bundestag will be strongly tempted to evade judicial decisions that touch on interests that are fundamental to the parties, and that this temptation is particularly strong whenever public support or transparency is low. The theory further implies that judges of the FCC anticipate this potential for evasion and adjust their behavior in two ways. First, they will be sensitive to the preferences of legislative majorities and employ methods to reduce the costs of their decisions. Second, when they choose to annul a statute, they will try to increase the transparency surrounding the decision to generate greater pressure for compliance.

In the previous chapter, we found considerable evidence for the various components of this argument. Legislators reported that the costs of a decision affect their response to a judicial decision, and judges discussed a number of strategies they employ to reduce the political costs of their rulings. In this chapter, I illustrate these interactions in greater detail through a case study of the interactions between the Bundesverfassungsgericht and Bundestag in a particular policy area: public financing of political parties. This case study is particularly valuable because it traces the dynamics of the often contentious relationship between the FCC and the Bundestag as they interact repeatedly over the same issue.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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