The Russian Constitutional Court: An analysis of its evolution within a developing federal system.

摘要

This dissertation seeks to answer a question: Why after several years of operation, is the Second Russian Constitutional Court a weak court with limited authority in the political system? All new courts have problems becoming established, authoritative institutions due to a lack of independent enforcement power, and this is complicated when the courts are part of a new democracy. To create enforcement power, courts must establish legitimate authority with outside political and legal interests. Previous research is divided on how this authority is achieved, but focuses on two possible processes: the initial formation of the court and its powers, and the performance (function) of the court after formation. This dissertation proposes a model of constitutional court performance to test if function over time is indeed how courts gain legitimate authority. The model has four stages and has a feedback loop which shows increases or decreases in legitimate authority with outside interests over time. To test the model, constitutional court cases concerning the issue of federalism in Russia during the period 1995-2003 are used to provide a variation of political and legal interests in the research. Using quantitative and qualitative (case study) research, evidence is gathered that shows that the Second Russian Constitutional Court decreased its legitimate authority over time, particularly with the regions in the Russian federal system. A comparison is then made between the development of the Russian Court and the new constitutional courts of two other countries, Hungary and South Africa. Both of these courts became powerful institutions over time through their performance, but the Hungarian case is one where the court is very powerful due to its formation and performance and the South African court lost authority because it avoided political conflict in its acceptance and hearing of cases. The research for this dissertation shows that court function is more important than formation in creating court authority and that the Second Russian Court is atypical in terms of building authority; not all constitutional courts will become weak ones because they are part of new democracies.