Appendix - Balancing Language

Online-Appendix and Replication Data for the paper:

Balancing as a mean of judicial activism? Analysis of the German Federal Constitutional Court's use of balancing language

Forthcoming:

German Law Journal 

Abstract:

Many constitutional courts use balancing in constitutional right adjudication. However, critics argue that balancing is an (self-)empowerment of the courts and a tool of judicial activism. It is claimed that constitutional courts are increasingly using this technique when ruling against the legislature, e.g. when striking down laws. This study empirically examines the status of balancing in the case law of the German Federal Constitutional Court. It demonstrates that text-as-data methods can be used to analyze judicial reasoning by using word embeddings to measure the use of balancing language. It is shown that the use of balancing language increased during the first 50 years of the court's existence. Since then, there has been a decline. The court also tends not to use more balancing language in decisions overturning laws. This evidence challenges the critique's assumption that balancing is a tool of judicial activism.

The main dataset for the analysis and the R code with the key model for replication can be found here (replication.zip) in addition to the online appendix.

Version 2 of this repository (which fixes a small bug in version 1)  contains the files of the final publication.

Please feel free to contact me for the full code and data:

[e-mail]

This research has been realized in the L.L.Con project graciously funded in the years 2017-2024 by means of the Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz prize awarded to Prof. Dr. Christoph Möllers

https://www.lehrstuhl-moellers.de/llcon