Litigation, mobilization and governance: The European court and transnational activists.

摘要

Courts, and the actors they mobilize, are increasingly shaping the direction of domestic and international policy processes—a reality that challenges our current theoretical understandings of comparative and international politics. On the other hand, while public law scholars have long acknowledged the political power of courts, much of their intellectual inquiry fails to move beyond the borders of the American legal system and thus, leaves the impact of foreign and international courts under-theorized. This dissertation attempts to build a bridge.; The study elaborates a comparative framework for understanding the interaction between social movements and courts in the construction of governance. This is a theory of institutional change. The empirical research in the dissertation focuses on the emergence and evolution of supranational governance in Europe. I argue that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and transnational activists were integral to this evolution.; Methodologically, the project relies on time-series data and process tracing via case law, document collections, historical accounts, and personal interviews with social movement activists. The data includes two legal domains—social provisions and environmental protection—and examines cross-national variation in litigation pursuant to the preliminary ruling procedure from all fifteen European Union countries. The mobilization portion of the study examines transnational activism in these two legal domains.; The findings illustrate that vague EU rules can create national level disparities that often serve as a basis for new rights claims. As activists mobilize and exploit these new opportunities, this litigation in turn can empower the Court by providing the opportunity to clarify and construct new EU rules. I find that national government policy positions did not systematically constrain the ECJ rulings and attempts to correct adverse decisions were minimal. Another key lesson of this study is the reciprocal effect of this mobilization. That is, once public interest activists were given access to EU opportunities they have pressured for greater public inclusion and attention to public concerns, in a policy arena that was traditionally dominated by nation states.