Ideology on Both Sides: Judges' and Governments' Preferences at the CJEU (J-Pref)

These data provide a unified ideological scaling of governments and judges in the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in a shared policy space. The data capture the preferences of all judges serving on the Court of Justice and the General Court since the 1950s and the ideological positions of the appointing national governments at the time of each judicial nomination. The database consists of two linked tables: judge_pref.csv – Judge–level data covering every judge appointed to the Court of Justice and the General Court, including ideological scores for each judge and metadata about the appointing government. gvt_pref.csv – Government-date–level data containing ideology scores derived from Manifesto Project data and rescaled to the same latent space as judges. The dataset allows researchers to analyze preference alignment between national governments and the judges they nominate, as well as temporal trends in ideological polarization within the Court. All variables, scale construction, and matching rules are documented in the accompanying README and codebook files.