Based on data from the EU Justice Scoreboard, we identify a puzzle: National levels of judicial independence (as perceived by the citizens of EU member states) are negatively associated with the presence of formal legislation usually considered as conducive to judicial independence. We try to...

The Middle East is the most terror-prone region of the world. It is almost exclusively governed by autocratic regimes that often explicitly refer to Islam to justify some of their policies. In this paper, we analyse government reactions to terrorist events in the states that are members of the...

This paper shows that courts are not only a crucial part of the rule of law in the conventional sense but that they can also serve an important function in revealing information regarding the performance of lower level governments to the central government, and thereby improve their performance....

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only caused thousands to die and millions to lose their jobs, it has also prompted more governments to simultaneously to declare a state of emergency than ever before. States of emergency usually imply the extension of executive powers that diminishes the powers of...

Constitutional loyalty, the importance ascribed to complying with constitutional rules, is difficult to measure across countries due to differences in context, history, and culture. We overcome this challenge by exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as an ideal setting in which societies around the...

Prosecutors are immensely influential in every judicial system, yet very little is known about the impact of their organization. Here we ask two questions: (1) whether crimes committed by public officials are more likely to be prosecuted when prosecutors are independent, and (2) whether this...

In this paper, we focus on determinants of judicial efficiency in China, with efficiency estimates of district courts obtained from data envelopment analysis (DEA). Our dataset comprises 1584 local courts pooled from the year 2014 - 2017. Controlling for local economic development level as well...