JUDICON-EU: Judicial constraints on legislatures in Europe, 1990-2020

The Judicial Constraints on Legislatures in Europe (JUDICON-EU) dataset provides ruling-level data on constitutional court decisions in 19 European countries for the period 1990–2020. The dataset records how constitutional courts review legislation and how their rulings affect legislative discretion. It disaggregates constitutional court decisions into individual rulings, codes the form of constitutional review, legal effects, prescriptions addressed to legislatures, strike-downs, and legislative restraint, and links rulings to majority decisions, dissenting opinions, and individual judges. The data were created through a multi-stage coding process, beginning with methodological pilots and followed by country-level coding by legal experts using official constitutional court decision repositories and collections. The final dataset includes more than 15,000 constitutional court decisions, nearly 25,000 majority rulings, and more than 5,000 dissenting opinions. The dataset supports comparative research on constitutional courts, judicial politics, legislative–judicial relations, democratic governance, and the rule of law. The repository contains three files: the main ruling-level dataset, a judge reference file, and the codebook. The main dataset is provided as "JUDICONEU_dataset.csv" and contains the ruling-level observations and coded variables. The judge reference file "JUDICONEU_judges.csv" links the judge indicator variables in the main dataset to the names of individual judges. The codebook "JUDICONEU_codebook.pdf" provides detailed variable definitions, coding rules, and category labels. For more details (methodology, publications, etc.) on the JUDICON-EU research project, visit: https://judiconeu.uni-nke.hu/