The impact of the compositional change on the decisions of the constitutional court of Turkey

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1819777 (Table of Contents)

This thesis studies the motivations behind Constitutional Court justices’ decisions, and investigates whether the compositional change of the Court significantly influenced the decisions justices make. By using an original and comprehensive dataset, I measure the Constitutional Court justices’ ideal points in a two dimensional ideology space. I then question whether justices’ ideologies and background characteristics are significant determinants of their votes and dissents in annulment action cases between 2002 and 2016. The findings suggest that the more restrainist and liberal a justice is, the more likely she will vote for the unconstitutionality. The empirical analyses also show that ideology is a significant determinant of justices’ dissenting votes and conditional upon the majority decision. An equally important question this thesis seeks to answer is whether the impact of justices’ ideologies on their votes has been significantly different after the Court’s compositional change. I show that the activist-restrainist dimension was not a significant determinant of justices’ votes but became significant after the 2010 Constitutional Amendments. The analyses also show that the probability of voting for the unconstitutionality of annulment action cases between 2010 and 2016 is significantly lower than the cases between 2002 and 2010