Estimating Judicial Ideal Points of the Justices of the Turkish Constitutional Court between 1962 and 1982

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Yildirim E., Kutlar A., Gülener S.

AMME IDARESI DERGISI, vol.50, pp.1-31, 2017 (SSCI) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 50
  • Publication Date: 2017
  • Journal Name: AMME IDARESI DERGISI
  • Journal Indexes: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, TR DİZİN (ULAKBİM)
  • Page Numbers: pp.1-31
  • Bursa Uludag University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze judicial political attitudes of justices of the Turkish Constitutional Court (TCC) between 1962 and 1982 by means of Item Response Theory using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMM) algorithms. We have created an original database in which the Court’s decisions on merit concerning abstract and concrete norms reviews and dissolution of political parties are classified into categories of libertarian, statist and unclassified and votes of the justices are coded under one of these categories. As a result of ideal point estimations, we have found that neither a libertarian nor a statist attitude was dominant for a great majority of the Court’s justices. We conclude that contrary to the widely-held belief, the justices of the TCC didnot adopt a strict statist attitude in the examined period.