An Empirical Analysis of Judicial

OZAN O.
VAROL, LUCIA DALLA PELLEGRINA &
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ajcl/article-abstract/65/1/187/3897142 by Universiti Malaya user on 09 October 2019

NUNO GAROUPA*
An Empirical Analysis of Judicial

Transformation in Turkey†
Constitutional amendments in September 2010 restructured the

Turkish Constitutional Court (TCC) by imposing term limits, adding
six additional seats to the Court, and bolstering the role of the politi-
cal branches in the appointments process. Numerous commentators
have argued that the structural reforms amounted to court packing,
influenced court decisions in substantive ways, and undermined the
TCC’s ability to serve as an effective check on the political branches.
But aside from speculation and normative analyses of isolated TCC
decisions, there has been no systematic academic study on the con-
sequences of the reforms. In this Article, we aim to fill this scholarly
gap. By making use of an original dataset of 200 cases, randomly cho-
sen for the period 2007–2014, we test the extent to which these reforms
have changed judicial behavior. Our findings show a significant
break in 2010 in the ideological position of the Court and detect a
conservative ideological shift following the reforms that is increasing
in magnitude over time. This shift, however, has not yet affected judi-
cial outcomes in a statistically significant manner. We explain these
results and discuss their implications.
Introduction
Constitutional courts have played a significant role in the legal
analysis and comparative study of constitutional matters. More
recently, constitutional courts have received increasing attention
because the appropriate design of constitutional review plays an
important role in understanding comparative judicial politics.1 This
* Ozan O. Varol is an Associate Professor at Lewis & Clark Law School. Lucia
Dalla Pellegrina is an Assistant Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Nuno
Garoupa is a Professor of Law at Texas A&M University School of Law and holds the
Chair in Research Innovation at Católica Global School of Law, Portugal. For their
thoughtful comments and feedback, we thank the anonymous referees of the American
Journal of Comparative Law and the participants at the Second Annual Conference
on Comparative Constitutional Law at Koç University Law School in Istanbul, Turkey.
Hazal Kirca, Kelsey Benedick, and Kelly Iler provided excellent research assistance.
† http://dx.doi/org/10.1093/ajcl/avx013
1. Tom Ginsburg, Judicial Review in New Democracies: Constitutional Courts in
Asian Cases (2003).
© The Author [2017]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American
Society of Comparative Law. All rights reserved. For permissions, please
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188 T H E A M E R I CA N J O U R N A L O F C O M PA R AT I V E L AW [Vol. 65
analysis involves critical choices such as centralization, standing,

court size, the judicial appointment mechanism, and the scope of
constitutional review (e.g., abstract versus concrete review). These

choices configure a certain response to the potential or expected
problems as understood by the constitutional drafters.2
Different theories have developed in the United States to explain
judicial decision-making on a constitutional court. Formalists usu-
ally take the view that constitutional court judges simply interpret
and apply the constitution with a conformist view to precedents.3 In
a completely different perspective, the attitudinal model sees judi-
cial preferences, especially judicial ideology, as the main explanatory
model.4 Finally, agency theorists recognize the importance of judicial
preferences but argue that they are implemented in light of politi-
cal and institutional realities that add a strategic element to judicial
decision-making.5
Legal scholars and political scientists have focused much
empirical attention on the United States Supreme Court. 6
Empirical debate about other constitutional courts is an emerging
literature, with notable applications in Europe and North America,7
2. See, e.g., R obert D. C ooter , T he S trategic C onstitution (2000); Donald

S. Lutz, Toward a Theory of Constitutional Amendment, 88 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 355
(1994); Francisco Ramos, The Establishment of Constitutional Courts: A Study of 128
Democratic Constitutions, 2 Rev. L. & Econ. 103 (2006).
3. See, e.g., Lawrence B. Solum, The Supreme Court in Bondage: Constitutional
Stare Decisis, Legal Formalism, and the Future of Unenumerated Rights, 9 U. Pa.
J. Const. L. 155, 166 (2006) (describing formalism as the belief that “judges should
apply the law rather than make it” and “should consider themselves bound by the
Court’s prior decisions”).
4. See, e.g., Jeffrey A. Segal & Harold J. Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the
Attitudinal Model Revisited (2002); Brian D. Lammon, What We Talk About When We
Talk About Ideology: Judicial Politics Scholarship and Naïve Legal Realism, 83 St.
John’s L. Rev. 231, 244–45 (2009) (describing the attitudinal model’s proposition that
political values guide judicial decisions).
5. See, e.g., Saul Brenner & Harold J. Spaeth, Majority Opinion Assignments
and the Maintenance of the Original Coalition on the Warren Court, 32 Am. J. Pol.
Sci. 72 (1988); Jeffrey A. Segal and Albert D. Cover, Ideological Values and the Votes
of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 83 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 557 (1989); Lee Epstein & Jack
Knight, The Choices Justices Make (1998); Segal & Spaeth, supra note 4; Thomas
G. Hansford & James F. Spriggs II, The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme
Court (2006).
6. See sources cited supra notes 3–5.
7. On Canada, see C. Neal Tate & Panu Sittiwong, Decision Making in the
Canadian Supreme Court: Extending the Personal Attributes Model Across Nations,
51 J. Pol. 900 (1989); Benjamin Alarie & Andrew James Green, Should They All Just
Get Along? Judicial Ideology, Collegiality, and Appointments to the Supreme Court of
Canada, 58 U.N.B. L.J. 73 (2008); Benjamin Alarie & Andrew James Green, Policy
Preference Change and Appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada, 47 Osgoode
Hall L.J. 1 (2009). On Germany, see Georg Vanberg, The Politics of Constitutional
Review in Germany (2009). On Italy, see Albert Breton & Angela Fraschini, Vertical
Competition in Unitary States: The Case of Italy, 114 Pub. Choice 57 (2003); Nadia
Fiorino et al., The Determinants of Judiciary Independence: Evidence from the
Italian Constitutional Court (1956–2002), 163 J. I nst . & T heoretical E con . 683
(2007); Fabio Padovano, The Time-Varying Independence of Italian Peak Judicial
Institutions, 20 C onst . P ol . E con . 230 (2009); Lucia Dalla Pellegrina & Nuno
2017] A N E M P I R I CA L A N A LY S I S O F J U D I C I A L T R A N S F O R M AT I O N 189
Asia, 8 and Latin America. 9 But constitutional courts in other

regions of the world have been relatively understudied.
This Article’s contribution is to provide an empirical study of the

2010 structural reforms of the Turkish Constitutional Court (TCC).
Turkey’s legal and judicial systems have become increasingly salient
as various legal and political scholars touted Turkey as a model for
the constitutional reconstructions that occurred after the 2011 Arab
Spring.10 Turkey’s democratic credentials were buttressed, particu-
larly beginning in the 2000s, as Turkey underwent numerous legal
and constitutional changes to gain accession to the European Union
Garoupa, Choosing Between the Government and the Regions: An Empirical Analysis
of the Italian Constitutional Court Decisions, 52 Eur. J. Pol. Res. 558 (2013); Nuno
Garoupa & Veronica Grembi, Judicial Review and Political Partisanship: Moving
from Consensual to Majoritarian Democracy, 43 Int’l Rev. L. & Econ. 32 (2015);
Fabio Padovano & Nadia Fiorino, Strategic Delegation and “Judicial Couples” in the
Italian Constitutional Court, 32 Int’l Rev. L. & Econ. 215 (2012). On Portugal, see
Sofia Amaral-Garcia et al., Judicial Independence and Party Politics in the Kelsenian
Constitutional Courts: The Case of Portugal, 6 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 381 (2009). On
France, see Raphaël Franck, Judicial Independence Under a Divided Polity: A Study
of the Rulings of the French Constitutional Court, 1959–2006, 25 J.L. Econ. & Org.
262 (2009); Raphaël Franck, Judicial Independence and the Validity of Controverted
Elections, 12 Am. L. & Econ. Rev. 423 (2010). On Spain, see Nuno Garoupa et al.,
Judging Under Political Pressure: An Empirical Analysis of Constitutional Review
Voting in the Spanish Constitutional Court, 29 J.L. E con . & O rg . 513 (2013);
Chris Hanretty, Dissent in Iberia: The Ideal Points of Justices on the Spanish and
Portuguese Constitutional Tribunals, 51 Eur. J. Pol. Res. 671 (2012).
8. On Japan, see J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric B. Rasmusen, Measuring Judicial
Independence: The Political Economy of Judging in Japan (2003), and in particular on
the Japanese Supreme Court, see J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric B. Rasmusen, The Case
for Managed Judges: Learning from Japan After the Political Upheaval of 1993, 154
U. Pa. L. Rev. 1879 (2006). On Taiwan, see Ginsburg, supra note 1; Nuno Garoupa et
al., Explaining Constitutional Review in New Democracies: The Case of Taiwan, 20
Pac. Rim L. & Pol’y J. 1 (2011); Lucia Dalla Pellegrina et al., Judicial Ideal Points in
New Democracies: The Case of Taiwan, 7 Nat’l Taiwan U. L. Rev. 123 (2012) [herein-
after Dalla Pellegrina et al., Judicial Ideal Points in Taiwan]. On the Philippines, see
Laarni Escresa & Nuno Garoupa, Testing the Logic of Strategic Defection: The Case of
the Philippine Supreme Court—An Empirical Analysis (1986–2010), 21 Asian J. Pol. Sci.
189 (2013); Laarni Escresa & Nuno Garoupa, Judicial Politics in Unstable Democracies:
The Case of the Philippine Supreme Court, an Empirical Analysis 1986–2010, 3 Asian
J.L. & Econ. 2154 (2012); Lucia Dalla Pellegrina et al., Measuring Judicial Ideal Points
in New Democracies: The Case of the Philippines, 1 Asian J.L. & Soc’y 125 (2014) [herein-
after Dalla Pellegrina et al., Judicial Ideal Points in the Philippines].
9. On Argentina, see Rebecca Bill Chávez, The Evolution of Judicial Autonomy
in Argentina: Establishing the Rule of Law in an Ultrapresidential System, 36 J.
L atin A m . S tud . 451 (2004); Gretchen Helmke, The Logic of Strategic Defection:
Court-Executive Relations in Argentina Under Dictatorship and Democracy, 96
Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 96 (2002); Matias Iaryczower et al., Judicial Independence in
Unstable Environments, Argentina 1935–1998, 46 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 699 (2002); Matias
Iaryczower et al., Judicial Lobbying: The Politics of Labor Law Constitutional
Interpretation, 100 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 85 (2006). On Chile, see Lisa Hilbink, Judges
Beyond Politics in Democracy and Dictatorship: Lessons from Chile (2007). More gen-
erally, see Diana Kapiszewski & Matthew M. Taylor, Doing Courts Justice? Studying
Judicial Politics in Latin America, 6 P ersp . on P ol . 741 (2008). On Brazil, see
Carolina Arlota & Nuno Garoupa, Do Specialized Courts Make a Difference? Evidence
from Brazilian State Supreme Courts, 27 Eur. Bus. L. Rev. 487 (2016).
10. See, e.g., Ozan O. Varol, The Turkish “Model” of Civil–Military Relations, 11
Int’l J. Const. L. 727 (2013).
under the leadership of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet

ve Kalkinma Partisi—the AKP). These changes included a sweep-
ing constitutional amendment package proposed by the AKP and

adopted by referendum in September 2010.
The amendment package restructured, among other institutions,
the TCC, which had proved to be a formidable counter-majoritar-
ian force against the AKP’s legal reform agenda. The changes were
adopted purportedly to decrease the influence of what the incumbent
government viewed as an activist constitutional court that served as
a guardian of the old political order and secular elites. Among other
things, the reforms imposed term limits, added six additional seats to
the Court, and restructured the appointments process to bolster the
role of the political branches in that process.
The adoption of the reform package and the resulting additional
appointments to the Court caused widespread controversy and
speculation. Some scholars have argued that the structural reforms
amounted to court packing, influenced court decisions in substan-
tive ways, and undermined the TCC’s ability to serve as an effective
check on the political branches.11 Other scholars, in contrast, have
argued that the reforms have had “an overwhelmingly liberalizing
effect.”12 But aside from speculation and normative analyses of iso-
lated TCC decisions, there has been no systematic academic study
on the consequences of the reforms. The TCC in general has been
understudied in the literature. Although its particularly contro-
versial decisions have been the subject of intense scholarly debate,
there have been only a handful of systematic, quantitative analyses
of the TCC.13
11. Haldun Gülalp, The Battle for Turkey’s Constitution, The Guardian (Sept. 4, 2010),
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/sep/04/turkey-constitution-undemocratic
(criticizing the amendment package as a vehicle for the AKP to pack the Constitutional
Court, with other proposed changes “added for democratic window-dressing”).
12. Asli Ü. Bâli, The Perils of Judicial Independence: Constitutional Transition
and the Turkish Example, 52 Va. J. Int’l L. 235, 297 (2012) (characterizing the 2010
amendment package as having an “overwhelmingly liberalizing effect,” by “civilianiz-
ing the military coup-era constitution, strengthening individual freedoms and politi-
cal rights, and undertaking much-needed judicial reform”); A. Serra Cremer, Turkey
Between the Ottoman Empire and the European Union: Shifting Political Authority
Through the Constitutional Reform, 34 Fordham Int’l L.J. 279, 346 (2011) (conclud-
ing that despite its shortcomings, the 2010 amendment package “paves the way for a
new, civil, and democratic Constitution in the future”).
13. Ceren Belge, Friends of the Court: The Republican Alliance and Selective
Activism of the Constitutional Court of Turkey, 40 Law & Soc’y Rev. 653 (2006);
Yasushi Hazama, Hegemonic Preservation or Horizontal Accountability: Constitutional
Review in Turkey, 33 Int’l Pol. Sci. Rev. 421, 435 (2011) (presenting a quantita-
tive analysis of the TCC’s decisions from 1984 to 2007 and arguing that the Court
did not favor state-elite parties over non-state elite parties and that the Court is
more inclined to accept referrals for judicial review that allege executive transgres-
sions than those that allege violations of secular-unitary state principles); Hootan
Shambayati & Güliz Sütçü, The Turkish Constitutional Court and the Justice and
Development Party (2002–2009), 48 Middle E. Stud. 107 (2012) (finding that the
annulment rates of the TCC decreased slightly after the Justice and Development
In this Article, we aim to fill part of that scholarly gap by pre-

senting the first quantitative study of the 2010 reforms. By mak-
ing use of an original dataset of 200 cases randomly chosen for the

period 2007–2014, we test the extent to which these reforms have
changed judicial behavior. Our findings show a significant break in
2010 in the ideological position of the Court and detect a conserva-
tive ideological shift following the reforms that is increasing in mag-
nitude over time. This shift, however, has not yet affected judicial
outcomes in a statistically significant manner.
The Article proceeds as follows. An overview of the TCC and the
2010 reforms is presented in Part I. In order to analyze the ideologi-
cal shifts on the Court, we present ideal points estimation in Part II.
We then consider whether the dynamics of the Court (e.g., in terms
of dissent rates) changed after the 2010 reforms. A quantitative anal-
ysis of judicial outcomes is addressed in Part III and a more detailed
empirical model that examines individual votes is presented in Part
IV. The final Part discusses our results and their implications.
I. Background on the Turkish Constitutional Court

To explain the recent reforms to the TCC, it is necessary to begin
with a brief exposition of its establishment and the evolution of its
structure and appointments process. The TCC’s history sheds light
on the purported reasons behind the recent structural changes as
well as the modern scholarly debates over its jurisprudence. After
explaining its formation and history, we turn to a discussion of the
rise to political power of the AKP and the reforms it championed that
restructured the Constitutional Court.
A. Formation and History

The TCC was established by Turkey’s 1961 constitution, which
was drafted following a military coup in May 1960.14 The coup
Party took office); Yasushi Hazama, Constitutional Review and the Parliamentary
Opposition in Turkey, 34 Developing Economies 316, 337 (1996) (finding that “Turkey
ranks among the highest in Europe in the number of referrals and nullity decisions in
abstract constitutional review”); Artun Ünsal, Si̇yaset ve Anayasa Mahkemesi̇ [Politics
and the Constitutional Court] 220–24, 227, 235–49 (1980) (including quantitative data
on TCC decisions from 1962 to 1977). The most recent empirical analysis of the TCC
documents the extent to which judicial behavior responds to political interests: see
Aylin Aydin Cakir, The Interaction Between Judicial Preferences and Political Context
in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Turkey (unpublished manuscript) (on file
with the authors). In particular, for the period 1984–2010 (stopping at the September
2010 reforms), the Court found laws unconstitutional less frequently when there was
a dominant party (before 1991 and after 2002) and more frequently when there was
a politically weak government (between 1991 and 2002). Id. Within the timeframe of
our Article (2007–2014), there is a dominant party with a parliamentary majority and
therefore our empirical results cannot be directly compared.
14. Turkey’s first constitution (Teskilat-i Esasiye Kanunu) was adopted in 1921.
The Ottoman Empire, the predecessor to the modern Republic of Turkey, also adopted
a constitution in 1876.
toppled the Adnan Menderes government with the promise of a swift

return to civilian rule after the adoption of a new liberal constitution
and democratic elections. The initial draft of the constitution was

prepared by a panel of law professors handpicked by the military
junta that had staged the coup, and the panel frequently consulted
the junta during the drafting process.15 The constituent assembly
that ratified the final draft likewise comprised primarily members
of the military and other loyalist groups.16 The drafters of the con-
stitution viewed the single-chamber parliament as the root cause of
the country’s drift to authoritarianism. As a result, the constitution
established a plethora of counter-majoritarian institutions with sig-
nificant supervisory powers over elected officials.
The 1961 constitution adopted a traditional civil law approach
to judicial structure with multiple supreme courts. The Court of
Cassation had jurisdiction over civil and criminal matters, the
Council of State had jurisdiction over administrative law matters,
and the TCC had jurisdiction to “review the constitutionality of laws
and the by-laws of the Turkish Grand National Assembly.”17 The TCC
comprised fifteen permanent and five substitute members.18
For appointments to the TCC, the constitution adopted a multi-
constituency model, dividing the appointment power among vari-
ous institutions. Eight of the fifteen permanent members would be
selected by the next highest courts (the Council of State, the Court
of Cassation, and the Court of Accounts), two by the President
of the Republic, three by the National Assembly, and two by the
Senate, though the Senate had to draw one of its appointees from
three nominations of the Military Court of Cassation.19 The author-
ity to select a majority of the members on the Court was thus given
to the unelected judiciary, ensuring that professional judges would
dominate the Court. At the time, the judiciary was more likely to be
aligned with the coup leadership than the elected branches. Turkey
adopted a career model rather than a recognition model of judicial
appointments, which recycles a relatively homogenous group of elites
across the judicial system.20
Reflecting the military’s trust in sympathetic unelected guard-
ians, the new constitution also adopted a liberal definition of stand-
ing. A wide range of persons and institutions could petition the
Court for constitutional review of legislation: the President of the
15. Ozan O. Varol, The Democratic Coup d’État, 53 Harv. Int’l L.J. 291, 352
(2012).
16. Belge, supra note 13, at 661.
17. See Türk i̇ye Cumhur i̇yet i̇ Anayasası [Constitution of the Republic of Turkey]
(1961) art. 147, translation at http://www.anayasa.gen.tr/1961constitution-text.pdf.
18. Id. art. 145.
19. Id.
20. Nuno Garoupa & Tom Ginsburg, Judicial Reputation: A Comparative Theory 50
(2015); Hootan Shambayati, A Tale of Two Mayors: Courts and Politics in Iran and
Turkey, 36 Int’l J. Middle E. Stud. 253, 270 (2004).
Republic, political parties represented in Parliament, political par-

ties that had obtained at least 10% of votes in the last general elec-
tion, and one-sixth of the members of either the National Assembly

or the Senate.21 Universities, the High Council of Judges, and other
appellate courts (the Court of Cassation, the Council of State, and
the Military Court of Cassation) could also petition the Court for con-
stitutional review “in cases concerning their duties and welfare.”22
In practice, this broad definition of standing provided the TCC with
numerous opportunities to engage in judicial review and strike down
laws and regulations passed by the political branches.23
The constitution also empowered the Court to permanently dis-
solve political parties whose “statutes, programs and activities” did
not “conform to the principles of a democratic and secular republic,
based on human rights and liberties, and to the fundamental prin-
ciple of the State’s territorial and national integrity.”24 Furthermore,
the authority to bring a case for party dissolution was given to the
Chief Public Prosecutor of the Republic, a democratically unaccount-
able lawyer appointed by the President from a short list of nominees
prepared by fellow prosecutors.25 After its establishment, the Court
zealously exercised its authority to shut down political parties.26
The Court wielded its dissolution power primarily against Islamist
parties, such as the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) and the Virtue
Party (Fazilet Partisi), as well as against separatist Kurdish politi-
cal parties, such as the People’s Democratic Party (Halkin Demokrasi
Partisi) and the People’s Labor Party (Halkin Emek Partisi).27 The
Court’s targeting of Islamist and separatist parties is in line with the
principles—in particular, secularism and national unity—that can be
considered the common denominators espoused by the military lead-
ership that created the Constitutional Court.28
21. See Türk i̇ye Cumhur i̇yet i̇ Anayasası (1961) art. 149.
22. Id.
23. Hootan Shambayati, The Guardian of the Regime: The Turkish Constitutional
Court in Comparative Perspective, in Constitutional Politics in the Middle East 99,
106 (Saïd Amir Arjomand ed., 2008) (“Between 1962 and the September 1980 mili-
tary coup, the Constitutional Court received an average of 19 cases per annum
for abstract review. It found grounds for unconstitutionality in 37 percent of these
cases.”); Belge, supra note 13, at 654 (“[F]rom its establishment in 1962 until 1999,
[the Turkish Constitutional Court] struck down more than half the statutes referred
to it . . . .”). The Court also struck down a number of constitutional amendments.
Ozan O. Varol, The Origins and Limits of Originalism: A Comparative Study, 44
Vand. J. Transnat’l L. 1239 (2011).
24. See Türk i̇ye Cumhuri̇yet i̇ Anayasası (1961) art. 57.
25. See id.
26. Shambayati, supra note 23, at 113.
27. Id. at 116–17; Dicle Kogacioglu, Dissolution of Political Parties by the
Constitutional Court in Turkey: Judicial Delimitation of the Political Domain, 18 Int’l
Soc. 258, 259 (2003).
28. Ersel Aydinli, Nihat Aliz Özcan & Dogan Akyaz, The Turkish Military’s
March Toward Europe, 85 Foreign Aff. 77, 80 (2006); Shambayati, supra note 20, at
263; Belge, supra note 13, at 657.
As the Court grew more powerful following its establishment,

however, it began to issue opinions antagonistic to the military.29 For
example, in 1972, the Court found unconstitutional a law that estab-

lished martial law courts staffed with military judges.30 In 1975, the
Court struck down a law establishing state security courts, staffed in
part with military judges, that were authorized to try crimes against
the state. 31 And in 1977, the Court invalidated a constitutional
amendment adopted by a military-appointed cabinet that exempted
disciplinary decisions about judges from judicial review.32
Partially in response to the Court’s increasingly defiant stance,
the 1982 constitution, drafted following another military coup in
1980, restructured the Court. Among other things, it abolished the
authority of the legislature to make appointments to the Court, fur-
ther insulating it from political influence. Instead, it granted to the
President (who, from 1982 until 1989, was the leader of the 1980 mil-
itary coup) the authority to appoint all judges based on nominations
by other institutions, primarily the judiciary.33 At the time, many of
the institutions responsible for nominating judges to the Court were
under the direct or indirect influence of the military.34
B. The Rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP)

Established in 2001, the AKP was formed as an offshoot of the
Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) and the Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi),
both of which had been dissolved by the TCC for advocating an
Islamic change in the secular regime of the Turkish Republic.35
Unlike its predecessors, however, the AKP claimed to support
Turkey’s secular regime.36 The party touted itself as a mainstream
conservative party that represented a rising rural middle class and
stood for religious freedom, a liberal market economy, and Turkish
membership in the European Union. But despite its self-proclaimed
29. See Hootan Shambayati & Esen Kirdis, In Pursuit of “Contemporary

Civilization”: Judicial Empowerment in Turkey, 62 Pol. Res. Q. 767, 774–75 (2009).
30. Anayasa Mahkemesi [Constitutional Court], Decision of Oct. 14, 1972, Esas
No. 1971/31, Karar No. 1972/05. TCC cases are available on the Court’s website,
http://www.anayasa.gov.tr.
31. Anayasa Mahkemesi, Decision of Oct. 11, 1975, Esas No. 1974/35, Karar No.
1975/126.
32. Anayasa Mahkemesi, Decision of Sept. 6, 1977, Esas No. 1977/82, Karar No.
1977/117; Anayasa Mahkemesi, Decision of Apr. 21, 1977, Esas No. 1976/43, Karar
No. 1977/4.
33. See Türk i̇ye Cumhur i̇yet i̇ Anayasası [Constitution of the Republic of Turkey]
(1982) art. 146; Sujit Choudhry et al., Constitutional Courts After the Arab Spring:
Appointment Mechanisms and Relative Judicial Independence, in T he C enter
for C onstitutional T ransitions at NYU L aw & I nternational IDEA R eports :
Constitutional Design in the Middle East and North Africa 75 (2014).
34. Choudhry et al., supra note 33, at 75–76.
35. Adrien K. Wing & Ozan O. Varol, Is Secularism Possible in a Majority-Muslim
Country?: The Turkish Example, 42 Tex. Int’l L.J. 1, 49 (2006).
36. Justice and Development Party, http://www.akparti.org.tr/english/akparti/
parti-programme.
secular agenda, the AKP was widely viewed from its inception as an
Islamist-leaning party formed by the moderate factions of the dis-
solved Welfare Party and Virtue Party.37

The AKP assumed power in 2002 after winning 34.3% of the
popular vote in the general election. That victory landed the AKP
two-thirds of parliamentary seats under a constitutional provision
limiting seats in Parliament to political parties that earn at least
10% of the popular vote.38 The AKP’s victory was sweeping by the
standards of Turkey, which had been ruled by weak coalition govern-
ments throughout its modern history. The July 2007 general elec-
tions handed the AKP yet another landslide victory. The AKP won
46.6% of the vote—unseen in Turkey since the 1950s—and 341 of the
550 seats in Parliament.39
Following the AKP’s rise, the TCC became an institutional plat-
form for opposition parties to challenge the AKP’s political domina-
tion. One prominent challenge involved the selection in 2007 of the
Turkish President, who, at the time, was not elected by popular
vote but selected by Parliament. The AKP had a sufficient number
of parliamentary seats to select its preferred candidate, Abdullah
Gul. In an attempt to foil Gul’s election, the secular-left Republican
People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi—the CHP) petitioned the
TCC, arguing that the election of the President required a two-thirds
“super quorum” of Parliament. The TCC ruled in the CHP’s favor and
imposed a super quorum requirement, which did not exist in the con-
stitutional text.40
Subsequently, in 2008, the Chief Public Prosecutor petitioned the
TCC to dissolve the AKP and ban from political service seventy-one
senior AKP politicians on the grounds that the party had “become a
focus of anti-secular activities.”41 The Court voted for the AKP’s dis-
solution six to five—one vote short of the seven-vote supermajority
required to dissolve a political party. Although the AKP escaped dis-
solution by a slim margin, the Court stripped the party of half of its
public funding and issued a “serious warning” to the Party to con-
form its agenda to the Republic’s secular principles.42
Another controversial decision concerned a constitutional
amendment on education. Ratified in 2008, the amendment stated:
37. Wing & Varol, supra note 35, at 49.

38. Id. at 50.
39. İzgi Güngör, From Landmark Success to Closure: AKP’s Journey, Hürriyet
Daily News (July 22, 2008), http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/from-landmark-suc-
cess-to-closure-akps-journey.aspx?pageID=438&n=from-landmark-success-to-clo-
sure-akps-journey-2008-07-22. The share of seats the AKP occupied in Parliament
decreased due to a change in electoral laws.
40. Choudhry et al., supra note 33, at 76.
41. Turkey Court Finds AKP Anti-Secular, Al Jazeera (Oct. 24, 2008), http://www.
aljazeera.com/news/europe/2008/10/2008102453055142554.html.
42. Anayasa Mahkemesi, Decision of July 30, 2008, Esas No. 2008/1, Karar No.
2008/2 (translated by authors).
“No one shall be deprived of the right to higher education for what-
ever reason unless clearly stipulated by law.”43 Though neutral on
its face as to religion, the amendment was dubbed the “Headscarf

Amendment” in legislative debates.44 Its purpose was to override the
1989 and 1991 decisions of the TCC, which had interpreted the secu-
larism provisions in the constitution to disallow legislative attempts
to permit the wearing of Islamic headscarves in higher education
institutions.45
The Court’s jurisdiction to review the Amendment was dubious.
The 1982 constitution sought to rein in the TCC’s authority to review
constitutional amendments for substance. It restricted the Court’s
review of constitutional amendments to “form”46 and permitted the
Court to review a constitutional amendment only to ensure that the
amendment garnered the requisite supermajority in the legislature
and that the legislature complied with debate procedures.47 As recently
as 2007, the Court had held that it was “impossible” to review consti-
tutional amendments for substance and that its review as to form was
limited to the instances expressly specified in the constitution.48
Yet the Court struck down the Headscarf Amendment as uncon-
stitutional.49 It established its jurisdiction to review and invalidate
the Headscarf Amendment by holding that the legislature lacked
the constitutional authority to propose the Amendment in the first
place.50 The 1982 constitution prohibits Parliament from amend-
ing, or proposing to amend, the constitutional provisions governing
the fundamental characteristics of the Republic, including its secu-
lar regime.51 The Court concluded that, by enacting the Headscarf
Amendment, the legislature had effectively attempted to amend the
unamendable secularism provision in the constitution.52 According
43. Mehmet Cengiz Uzun, The Protection of Laicism in Turkey and the Turkish
Constitutional Court: The Example of the Prohibition on the Use of the Islamic Veil in
Higher Education, 28 Penn. St. Int’l L. Rev. 383, 418 (2010).
44. Varol, supra note 23, at 1289.
45. Uzun, supra note 43, at 418.
46. T ürk i̇ ye C umhur i̇ yet i̇ A nayasası [C onstitution of the R epublic of T urkey ]
(1982) art. 148 (“Constitutional amendments shall be examined and verified
only with regard to their form.”), translation at https://global.tbmm.gov.tr/docs/
constitution_en.pdf.
47. Id. (“[T]he verification of constitutional amendments shall be restricted to
consideration of whether the requisite majorities were obtained for the proposal and
in the ballot, and whether the prohibition on debates under urgent procedure was
complied with.”).
48. Anayasa Mahkemesi, Decision of Aug. 7, 2007, Esas No. 2007/72, Karar No.
2007/68.
2008/116.
50. Id.
51. Türk i̇ye Cumhur i̇yet i̇ Anayasası (1982) art. 4 (“[T]he provisions in Article 2 on
the characteristics of the Republic . . . shall not be amended, nor shall their amend-
ment be proposed.”).
2008/116.
to the Court, its review of the Headscarf Amendment was therefore

only of the Amendment’s form—not its substance.53

C. September 2010 Constitutional Amendments
In 2010, following these controversial TCC decisions, the
AKP announced that it was proposing a set of twenty-six constitu-
tional amendments. The amendments, according to the AKP, were
intended to accelerate Turkey’s accession to the European Union
and to democratize the antidemocratic 1982 constitution, which was
drafted following the 1980 military coup.54 The amendments pro-
posed a sweeping set of reforms. Among other things, the AKP pro-
posed to empower Parliament to pass affirmative action laws for
women, children, veterans, and the elderly; expand the constitutional
right to privacy; and prohibit military courts from trying civilians
except during war time.55 Tucked into this broader amendment pack-
age was a provision that altered the structure of the TCC in three
significant ways.
First, the number of seats on the Court would increase from
eleven permanent and four substitute members to seventeen perma-
nent members and no substitutes.56 Second, the amendments also
proposed to diversify the judges appointed to the Court by altering
the appointments system. Before the amendments, and as discussed
above, the President appointed all eleven judges, primarily based on
nominations from various judicial institutions (including the Turkish
High Court, the Turkish Council of State, the Turkish Military High
Court, and the Turkish Military High Court of Administration). 57
The amendment package proposed to add six new permanent seats
to the Court, authorized the political branches to appoint all six
judges, and reduced the proportion of TCC judges selected from the
judicial system.58
Under the AKP’s proposal, the President would select four-
teen of the seventeen judges on the Court. Seven of those fourteen
judges would be drawn from the high courts: three from the Court
of Cassation, two from the Council of State, one from the Military
High Court of Appeals, and one from the Military High Court
of Administration. For each appointment from the high courts,
the plenary assembly of each court would prepare a list of three
53. Id.
54. EU Presses Turkey for Constitution Reform, Hürriyet Daily News (Sept. 17,
2008), http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/eu-presses-turkey-for-constitution-reform.
aspx?pageID=438&n=eu-presses-turkey-for-constitution-reform-2008-09-17.
55. Varol, supra note 23, at 1295–96.
56. Id.
57. Ozan O. Varol, Turkey’s New Majoritarian Difficulty, Constitute Project
(Sept. 29, 2010), http://www.comparativeconstitutions.org/2010/09/turkeys-new-
majoritarian-difficulty.html.
58. Id.
nominations, from which the President would appoint one candidate.

Three of the fourteen judges subject to presidential appointment
would be drawn from candidates nominated by the Council of Higher

Education from a pool of teaching staff in the fields of law, economics,
and political science. And the final four of the fourteen judges would
be directly appointed by the President from lawyers, judges, prosecu-
tors, rapporteurs of the TCC, and senior administrative officers.59
Parliament would appoint three of the seventeen judges. Two of
those three judges would be drawn from a pool of three candidates
nominated by the Court of Accounts. The remaining judge would be
drawn from three lawyers nominated by the presidents of the bar
associations.60
Third, the proposal would also impose term limits for TCC
judges. Before the amendments, TCC judges could serve until the
mandatory retirement age of sixty-five.61 The reform would retain
the retirement age but would also limit the tenure of the judges on
the Court to a nonrenewable term of twelve years.62
In March 2010, the AKP submitted its constitutional reform
proposal to Parliament. The proposal could amend the constitution
in two ways. First, if the proposal were approved by a two-thirds
supermajority in Parliament (367 of 550 members), as well as by the
President, Parliament could amend the constitution immediately,
without a popular referendum. If, however, the proposal did not gar-
ner a two-thirds majority, then the proposal could be submitted to a
popular referendum if approved by three-fifths of Parliament (330 of
550 members) and by the President. The amendment restructuring
the TCC garnered 331 votes, barely passing the 330-vote threshold
required for the matter to be submitted to a popular referendum.63
Following parliamentary approval of the amendments, a fierce
public campaign ensued. Supporters of the amendments underscored
the importance of the reform package to Turkey’s accession to the
European Union.64 With respect to the TCC reforms, the AKP’s cam-
paign promised an independent and neutral judiciary and a transi-
tion from “the law of the superiors to the superiority of the law.”65
Supporters also argued that, with the amendments, the TCC would
59. Choudhry et al., supra note 33, at 79; T ürk i̇ye C umhur i̇ yet i̇ A nayasası
[Constitution of the Republic of Turkey] (1961) art. 146.
60. Türk i̇ye Cumhur i̇yeti̇ Anayasası (1961) art. 146.
61. Id. art. 147.
62. Id.
63. Turkish Constitutional Reform Package Goes to Final Round, H urriyet
D a i ly N e w s (Apr. 29, 2010), http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.
aspx?pageid=438&n=turkish-constitution-shake-up-faces-referendum-2010-04-29.
64. Varol, supra note 57; Robert Tait, For Egypt, Do All Roads Lead to Turkey?,
Radio Free Europe (Feb. 15, 2011), http://www.rferl.org/content/feature/2310086.html.
65. 12 Eylül Referandum Neden Evet Demeli [Why Vote “Yes” in the
September 12 Referendum], Y ou T ube (Sept. 4, 2010), http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=cA0Nq9Eabuk (translated by authors).
become a more inclusive institution comprising members from a

broader array of institutions.66
Opponents argued that the reforms were democratic window dress-

ing. They contended that the reforms would not eradicate or weaken
antidemocratic institutions, but simply bring them within the AKP’s
control.67 With respect to the TCC, opponents argued that the amend-
ment package would allow the AKP to pack the TCC with judges favor-
able to its ideology. Rather than making the appointments process more
inclusive and participatory, the reforms would undermine the indepen-
dence of the Court, rendering it subservient to the elected branches.68
A referendum on the amendments was symbolically held on
September 12, 2010—exactly thirty years after the September 12,
1980 coup. The referendum required the voters to accept or reject
the entire amendment package, with no ability to vote on individual
amendments. The results were a resounding success for the AKP, as
58% of the electorate approved the amendment package.69
The reforms, and the resulting additional appointments to the
TCC generated widespread controversy and speculation. Various
commentators have argued that the newly appointed judges are AKP
ideologues, and that the reforms have produced significant changes
in judicial philosophy and practice, curbing the TCC’s ability to effec-
tively check the political branches.70
In the next three Parts, we present a quantitative analysis of the
2010 reforms and discuss the extent to which they have affected judi-
cial behavior.
II. Ideal Points Estimation

In this Part, we use ideal points estimation to analyze whether
the September 2010 amendments have generated any ideological
changes for TCC judges. To test this hypothesis, we analyze individ-
ual votes on decisions issued by the TCC.
Our dataset consists of 200 cases, randomly chosen71 for the
period 2007–2014. Half of these cases were decided after the 2010
66. Id.
67. O z a n Va r o l , P r e s i d e n t i a l i s m i n Tu rk e y : I s I t A l r e a d y H e r e ? ,
C o n s t i t u t i o n N e t (Nov. 24, 2015), http://www.constitutionnet.org/news/
presidentialism-turkey-it-already-here.
68. Id.
69. Turkey’s Constitutional Referendum: Erdogan Pulls It Off, E conomist
( S e p t . 1 3 , 2 0 1 0 ) , h t t p : / / w w w. e c o n o m i s t . c o m / b l o g s / n e w s b o o k / 2 0 1 0 / 0 9 /
turkeys_constitutional_referendum.
70. Sukru Kucuksahin, Massive Reshuffle of Judges, Prosecutors is New Blow to
Turkish Judiciary, Al-Monitor (June 14, 2016), http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/orig-
inals/2016/06/turkey-judicial-independence-took-severe-blow.html#ixzz4bBTl1qZ0;
International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), Turkey: The Judicial System in Peril—A
Briefing Paper (2016), http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/57ee8e674.pdf; Ozan O. Varol,
Turkey’s New Majoritarian Difficulty, I-CONnect (Sept. 30, 2010), http://www.icon-
nectblog.com/2010/09/turkeys-new-majoritarian-difficulty/.
71. Cases were randomly selected. Our research assistant was instructed to select
one out of every seven cases following the Court’s numerical ordering of the cases.
reforms went into effect and the other half were decided before the
2010 reforms became effective. There are time lags in deciding cases,
which are reflected in the fact that the 200 cases in the dataset were

filed in the period 2000–2011 (the average lag is slightly more than
two years). Some cases involve multiple questions—that is, the same
petition raised several constitutional issues that required separate
decisions by the Court. As a result, we have 245 decisions, 114 before
the 2010 reforms and 131 after the 2010 reforms.72
These decisions include petitions for both abstract and concrete
review. Under the Turkish constitution, abstract review is possible
by petition of the “President of the Republic, parliamentary groups
of the ruling party or parties and of the main opposition party, and
a minimum of one-fifth of the total number of members of the Grand
National Assembly of Turkey.”73 Our dataset does not include any
petitions by the President. This is because, during the relevant time
period (2007–2014), the President, Abdullah Gul, was politically
aligned with the parliamentary majority and did not refer any laws
enacted by Parliament to the Constitutional Court.74
The Turkish constitution also permits concrete constitutional
review. Where another court in Turkey “finds that the law or the decree
having the force of law to be applied is unconstitutional, or if con-
vinced of the seriousness of a claim of unconstitutionality submitted
by one of the parties,” it must submit the constitutional question to the
Constitutional Court.75 Although referral cases are not ordinarily as
politically contentious as abstract review cases, we included them in our
dataset because they also produce ideological divisions on the Court.
The TCC is also authorized to audit the “acquisitions, revenue
and expenditure of political parties.”76 Our dataset includes these
audit decisions. We chose to include them in the interest of com-
prehensiveness and to detect any possible changes to the Court’s
approach to auditing opposition parties after the 2010 reforms.
Our dataset also includes individual votes. We have 2,481 indi-
vidual observations out of 147 cases.77 There are twenty-eight judges
72. The 2010 reforms also permitted access to the Court by way of individual
complaints filed by citizens alleging violations of their constitutional rights. We
excluded these complaints from our dataset since they are heard and decided by only
a subset of the TCC judges.
73. Türki̇ye Cumhuri̇yeti̇ Anayasası [Constitution of the Republic of Turkey] (1982)
art. 150, translation at https://global.tbmm.gov.tr/docs/constitution_en.pdf.
74. This political alignment persisted during the entire period except for a brief
six-month period from January to August 2007. During that time, President Ahmet
Necdet Sezer, who was politically antagonistic to the parliamentary majority, was in
power. President Abdullah Gul took office in August 2007 and served as President
until August 2014, when he was succeeded by the current President, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan.
75. Türk i̇ye Cumhur i̇yet i̇ Anayasası (1982) art. 152.
76. Id. art. 69.
77. While some cases have multiple issues with separate votes, audit cases
mostly did not identify individual votes. As a result, we were forced to exclude fifty-
three out of sixty-five audit cases from this analysis.
in our dataset who served on the Court during the relevant period
(2007–2014). Table 1 summarizes the statistics concerning individ-
ual votes and dissents, before and after the 2010 reforms. Overall,

there is a relatively low percentage of dissents (around 11% in
total). A few judges seem more prone to dissent (i.e., Perktaş, Akıncı,
Kantarcıoğlu, and Oto) while a larger group seems to exhibit dissent
aversion (i.e., Kömürcü, Necipoğlu, Altan, Üstün, Dursun, Akyalçın,
and Adalı). In particular, we can see that those judges who have
served before and after the reforms do not exhibit a different pattern
across time when it comes to dissent rates.
More particularly, Table 1 shows three different groups. The first
are judges, at the top of the table, who served before and after the
2010 reforms. Only Judge Paksüt seems to dissent more frequently
after the reforms. There are a few judges (Necipoğlu, Altan, and
Üstün) who were involved in a limited number of cases before 2010
and only dissented (in very small numbers) after 2010. They clearly
exhibit dissent aversion. A second group of judges, in the middle of
the table, served after the 2010 reforms only, and only Judge Akıncı
has a reasonably high rate of dissent. Finally, the last group of
judges, at the bottom of the table, served before 2010 only. A couple of
them have noticeable rates of dissent, namely Judges Kantarcıoğlu,
Oto, and Şat (the latter with small numbers in the dataset).
We initially estimated the evolution of each judge’s ideology
using a dynamic item response methodology (IRT).78 After retrieving
the ideal points for each judge and year, we performed a multivari-
ate regression analysis to check whether there have been systematic
ideological changes after 2010.
As for the IRT implementation, we assume that xijt is the vote of
each judge j (j = 1, . . . , J) for decision i (i = 1, . . . , N) at time of deci-
sion t (t = 1, . . . , T). We assign a value of one to dissenting opinions
(xijt = 1), whereas concurring opinions are assigned a value of zero
(xijt = 0). In our database the value of J is twenty-six; the number of
cases with nonunanimous voting, N is seventy-eight; and T is equal
to eight, from 2007 to 2013.79
According to the IRT, the vote of each judge corresponds to his
or her personal attributes—which we assume evolve over time—
as well as the characteristics of the decision. In particular, the
judge’s ideal point (θjt) is considered a latent variable that can be
measured indirectly by observing the judge’s manifest opinions
on several decisions of the Court. We allowed the presence of pos-
sible case characteristics that adjust the particular preference of
78. See Andrew D. Martin & Kevin M. Quinn, Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation
via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953–1999, 10 Pol.
Analysis 134 (2002).
79. There were actually eighty-two nonunanimous decisions in the dataset.
However, four of them were discarded since they involve judges that voted a limited
number of times, either always dissenting or always concurring with the majority.
Table 1. TCC Judges, 2007–2014.

Judge Name of Judge Total Dissent Total Dissent Total Dissent %

No. Before Before After After Votes Before &
After
1 Haşim Kılıç 71 6 91 7 162 13 8.0%
2 Serdar Özgüldür 70 5 102 12 172 17 9.9%
3 Serruh Kaleli 56 6 101 11 157 17 10.8%
Osman Alifeyyaz
4 72 5 97 16 169 21 12.4%
Paksüt
5 Zehra Ayla Perktaş 70 12 86 16 156 28 17.9%
6 Recep Kömürcü 13 2 104 6 117 8 6.8%
7 Engin Yıldırım 16 1 117 12 117 13 11.1%
8 Nuri Necipoğlu 14 0 115 5 115 5 4.3%
9 Alparslan Altan 11 0 101 5 112 5 4.5%
10 Burhan Üstün 11 0 101 4 112 4 3.6%
11 Hicabi Dursun 0 0 111 6 111 6 5.4%
12 Celal Mümtaz Akıncı 0 0 112 21 112 21 18.8%
13 Erdal Tercan 0 0 100 7 100 7 7.0%
14 Muammer Topal 0 0 66 5 66 5 7.6%
15 Zühtü Arslan 0 0 53 4 53 4 7.5%
16 Muhammed Emin Kuz 0 0 28 2 28 2 7.1%
17 Hasan Tahsin Gökcan 0 0 7 0 7 0 0.0%
18 Mehmet Erten 161 22 0 0 161 22 13.7%
19 Fulya Kantarcıoğlu 128 26 0 0 128 26 20.3%
20 Fettah Oto 48 17 0 0 48 17 35.4%
21 Ahmet Akyalçın 87 5 0 0 87 5 5.7%
22 Şevket apalak 54 7 0 0 54 7 13.0%
23 Sacit Adalı 52 3 0 0 52 3 5.8%
24 Abdullah Necmi Özler 50 4 0 0 50 4 8.0%
25 Mustafa Yıldırım 21 1 0 0 21 1 4.8%
26 Cafer Şat 10 2 0 0 10 2 20.0%
27 Ali Güzel 1 1 0 0 1 1 100.0%
28 H. Tülay Tuğcu 3 0 0 0 3 0 0.0%
1,019 125 1,492 139 2,481 264 10.6%
an individual judge to the relevant dimension when faced with a

specific decision. In particular, we define the parameter βi as a dis-
crimination parameter, which provides information on how effec-
tively a decision on a given issue can discriminate between judges’
ideology on the recovered dimension. We also account for a par-
ticular location of the decision in the relevant space (α i) since it
seems reasonable to assume heterogeneity across cases, especially

in terms of political content.
Suppose that the excess utility to a given judge, j, voting for con-

stitutionality in a particular decision, i, is the following:
zijt = −α i + βiθ jt + eijt (1)
where the error term, eijt, is distributed according to a standard nor-

mal distribution. Since the utility, zijt, is a latent variable, we assume
that xijt = 1 if zijt > 0 and xijt = 0 if zijt ≤ 0.
The estimated judicial ideal points are presented in one relevant
dimension, which typically follow a left–right or liberal–conservative
pattern.80 However, the model cannot be identified unless additional
restrictions are imposed. There are two possible approaches to address
this problem. One is to normalize the ideal points. The other is to con-
strain the position of two of the judges at the extremes of the recov-
ered one-dimensional latent space according to some priors regarding
the political preferences of these “extreme” judges. If the priors are
consistent, and the relevant dimension is correctly identified, all of the
other judges’ ideal points are estimated in relation to the two extreme
positions and will end up lying in between.81 We chose to employ the
latter empirical strategy, imposing constraints such that a negative
value is associated with the judge that is considered “more liberal,”
and a positive value is assigned to the “most conservative” judge.
We set Judge Tülay Tuğcu as the most “liberal.” She was the first
female President of the TCC and is known for having presided over sev-
eral controversial decisions against the AKP. Most prominently, Judge
Tuğcu was President of the TCC when the Court rendered its decision
in 2007, discussed in Part I.A, imposing a super quorum requirement for
presidential elections, which was widely considered an attempt to foil the
election of the AKP’s preferred presidential candidate, Abdullah Gul.
We set Judge Haşim Kılıç as the most “conservative” judge.
Judge Kılıç became President of the TCC after Judge Tuğcu retired.
80. See, e.g., Martin & Quinn, supra note 78; Dalla Pellegrina et al., Judicial Ideal
Points in the Philippines, supra note 8; Dalla Pellegrina et al., Judicial Ideal Points in
Taiwan, supra note 8; Benjamin R.D. Alarie & Andrew Green, The Reasonable Justice:
An Empirical Analysis of Frank Iacobucci’s Career on the Supreme Court of Canada,
57 U. Toronto L.J. 195 (2007); Chris Hanretty, Dissent in Iberia: The Ideal Points of
Justices of the Spanish and Portuguese Constitutional Tribunals, 51 Eur. J. Pol. Res.
671 (2012); Chris Hanretty, The Decisions and Ideal Points of British Law Lords, 43
Brit. J. Pol. Sci. 703 (2012); Joshua Clinton et al., The Statistical Analysis of Roll Call
Data, 98 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 355 (2004); Daniel E. Ho & Kevin M. Quinn, Did a Switch
in Time Save Nine?, 2 J. Legal Analysis 69 (2010); Simon Jackman, Multidimensional
Analysis of Roll Call Data via Bayesian Simulation: Identification, Estimation,
Inference, and Model Checking, 9 Pol. Analysis 227 (2001).
81. Normalized estimates typically show better convergence properties compared
to non-normalized ones. See Joseph Bafumi et al., Practical Issues in Implementing
and Understanding Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation, 13 Pol. Analysis 171 (2005).
However, here we use the standard procedure followed in the literature since stand-
ard diagnostic tests suggest that convergence in our estimates is achieved.
He served on the Court from 1990 to 2015, and his ideology some-
what evolved during that time period. He was ideologically conser-
vative for most of his tenure and dissented in several politically

controversial “liberal” decisions, particularly those that were issued
when Tülay Tuğcu was president. For example, Judge Kılıç dissented
in the decisions that dissolved the Welfare Party and Virtue Party
for advocating Islamist changes to the country’s secular regime. As
noted above, these parties were the predecessors to the AKP, which
was formed by their moderate factions. Judge Kılıç was also the only
judge to dissent in the decision, discussed in Part I.A, that stripped
the AKP of half its public funding. He also dissented in the case,
also discussed in Part I.A, that found the Headscarf Amendment
unconstitutional.
We used the Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)
method in order to estimate the posterior probability distributions
for model (1). MCMC methods involve 50,000 iterations; the first
2,000 are discarded as burn-in. The thinning interval that we used
in the simulations is five. Gibbs sampling was adopted. We assumed
standard normal priors for the item parameters. The results of our
estimations are presented in Table 2 in terms of estimated dynamic
ideal points.
In Table 3, we report the average ideal points of the judges of
the Court regarding decisions before and after the 2010 reforms. In
particular, twenty-one judges have taken part the decisions of the
Court before 2010, while twenty judges (some do not coincide) voted
between 2010 and 2014.
Considering that the recovered dimension proceeds from lib-
eral (negative values) to conservative (positive values), a compari-
son between the average ideal points before and after the 2010
reforms allows us to draw some preliminary conclusions in favor of
a possible shift of the court toward more conservative positions after
2010. From Table 3, we can observe that the average ideal points
in the 2010–2014 period are indeed larger than those estimated for
2007–2009. This might occur either because the ideological positions
of all judges have shifted rightward, or because newly appointed
judges have been more rightward-oriented compared to judges in
earlier cases. In order to go more in-depth with this issue—as well
as to provide robustness to the conclusions concerning the general
rightward shift of ideologies—we regressed ideal points on year and
judges’ fixed effects.
We estimated the following equation:
θ jt = γ t + δ j + ν jt (2)
where θjt is the posterior mean of judges’ ideal points from the Item
Response Model previously estimated, and νjt is a normally distributed
Table 2. Posterior Means and Standard Deviations of Judges’ Ideal

Points from Item Response Model.

Mean (Standard Deviation)
Judge T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 T7 T8
1 1.49 (0.63) 1.64 (0.61) 1.80 (0.61) 1.96 (0.61) 2.06 (0.64) 2.15 (0.68) 2.22 (0.75) 2.25 (0.85)
2 0.99 (0.48) 1.01 (0.44) 0.93 (0.41) 0.90 (0.37) 0.81 (0.33) 0.48 (0.37) 0.38 (0.37) 0.37 (0.48)
3 1.10 (0.50) 1.14 (0.47) 1.12 (0.45) 1.05 (0.45) 1.00 (0.42) 0.89 (0.44) 0.91 (0.47) 0.87 (0.56)
4 0.13 (0.44) 0.02 (0.38) 0.14 (0.35) 0.17 (0.31) 0.10 (0.27) -0.26 (0.33) -0.58 (0.36) -0.56 (0.48)
5 -0.86 (0.48) -0.86 (0.42) -0.88 (0.38) -0.82 (0.36) -0.91 (0.32) -0.73 (0.38) -0.75 (0.42) -0.74 (0.53)
6 0.84 (0.45) 1.02 (0.40) 1.20 (0.43) 1.27 (0.47) 1.21 (0.55)
7 1.00 (0.47) 1.07 (0.43) 0.96 (0.48) 1.07 (0.50) 1.02 (0.57)
8 1.47 (0.54) 1.59 (0.51) 1.60 (0.53) 1.54 (0.57) 1.49 (0.65)
9 1.22 (0.50) 1.29 (0.46) 1.26 (0.50) 1.40 (0.54) 1.44 (0.63)
10 1.16 (0.48) 1.21 (0.44) 1.12 (0.47) 1.16 (0.50) 1.12 (0.58)
11 1.49 (0.56) 1.61 (0.54) 1.68 (0.56) 1.69 (0.60) 1.63 (0.68)
12 -0.58 (0.36) -0.43 (0.28) -0.02 (0.34) 0.16 (0.35) 0.18 (0.47)
13 1.55 (0.55) 1.63 (0.56) 1.62 (0.61) 1.64 (0.70)
14 1.14 (0.59) 1.12 (0.60) 1.09 (0.67)
15 0.97 (0.55) 1.04 (0.54) 1.01 (0.61)
16 0.62 (0.66) 0.62 (0.72)
17
18 -0.04 (0.43) -0.08 (0.38) -0.30 (0.35) -0.50 (0.32) -0.65 (0.29) -0.57 (0.35) -0.63 (0.38) -0.95 (0.48)
19 -0.95 (0.48) -1.08 (0.43) -1.06 (0.41) -1.00 (0.39) -0.98 (0.36) -1.03 (0.44) -1.06 (0.52)
20 -0.83 (0.59) -1.01 (0.55) -1.18 (0.50) -1.32 (0.47)
21 0.22 (0.46) 0.23 (0.42) 0.34 (0.40) 0.42 (0.40) 0.52 (0.37)
22 -1.18 (0.62) -1.32 (0.63) -1.40 (0.66) -1.43 (0.69)
23 0.87 (0.56) 1.02 (0.53) 1.10 (0.55) 1.13 (0.59)
24 0.42 (0.52) 0.48 (0.49) 0.53 (0.52) 0.43 (0.56)
25 0.79 (0.68) 0.85 (0.68) 0.90 (0.71)
26 0.45 (0.70) 0.36 (0.74)
Note: Judges are numbered according to Table 1. T1 = 2007; T4 = 2010; T8 = 2014. “Mean” and
“SD” are, respectively, the dynamic posterior means and the standard deviations of judges’ ideal
points.
Table 3. Average Posterior Means and Standard Deviations of

Judges’ Ideal Points Before and After 2010.
Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max
Average id points before 2010 21 0.433171 0.929075 -1.33183 1.719383
Average std. dev. id points before 2010 21 0.502897 0.104012 0.3588 0.72365
Average id points before 2010 20 0.61423 0.98337 -1.31564 2.171153
Average std. dev. id points before 2010 20 0.498226 0.112761 0.3418 0.7286
error term. Results, shown in Table 4, confirm the hypothesis that 2010
represents a break in the ideological position of the entire Court. In
particular, we report the output of four different specifications.
Table 4. Ideological Changes on the TCC for 2007–2014.

(a) (b) (c) (d)

2007 0.247 0.383
(0.248) (0.235)
2008 0.189 0.306
(0.246) (0.238)
2009 0.185 0.301
(0.260) (0.252)
2010 0.407* 0.274
(0.236) (0.252)
2011 0.561** 0.413**
(0.256) (0.172)
2012 0.734*** 0.586***
(0.227) (0.197)
2013 0.732*** 0.593***
(0.225) (0.189)
2014 0.914*** 0.618***
(0.199) (0.190)
Break 0.732*** 0.370***
(0.112) (0.120)
Judge 1 1.511*** 1.760***
(0.193) (0.082)
Judge 2 0.300 0.549***
(0.235) (0.172)
Judge 3 0.575*** 0.824***
(0.201) (0.123)
Judge 4 -0.539** -0.290
(0.244) (0.180)
Judge 5 -1.253*** -1.004***
(0.182) (0.084)
Judge 6 0.614*** 0.815***
(0.192) (0.104)
Judge 7 0.527** 0.728***
(0.203) (0.121)
Judge 8 1.040*** 1.240***
(0.201) (0.114)
Judge 9 0.823*** 1.023***
(0.196) (0.112)
Judge 10 0.656*** 0.856***
(0.206) (0.124)
Judge 11 1.124*** 1.325***
(0.195) (0.106)
Judge 12 -0.635*** -0.434***
(0.212) (0.145)
Table 4. Continued.
(a) (b) (c) (d)

Judge 18 -0.806*** -0.556***
(0.227) (0.169)
Judge 19 -1.431*** -1.182***
(0.191) (0.091)
Judge 21 0.012 0.274***
(0.201) (0.052)
R2 0.28 0.24 0.78 0.76
Note 1: Dependent variable is the posterior mean of judges’ ideal points from Item Response
Model. 2007–2014 are year dummy variables. Break is a dummy variable taking a value of one
from 2010 onwards. Judges are numbered according to Table 1.
Note 2: Robust standard errors in parenthesis. * p<0.1; ** p<0.05; *** p<0.01.
The first includes only γt, representing year fixed effects from
2007 to 2014 (column (a)). The constant term has been omitted to
avoid collinearity. First, time fixed effects are positive and signifi-
cant starting from 2010 onwards. Second, they increase in magnitude
with time, indicating a rightward shifting of judicial preferences.
This not only tends to support our hypothesis regarding the presence
of a break in 2010, but also suggests that the process is still ongoing,
as the largest parameter in 2014 indicates.
The second specification (column (b)) replaces year dummy vari-
ables with a single dummy taking a value of one from 2010 onwards
(Break). Again, the previous results are confirmed, providing the
same indications as the year dummy model.
The third specification (column (c)) adds judges’ fixed effects. We
account for judges who participated in at least five decisions of the
Court, while treating the others as an individual judge (residual cat-
egory). This helps address the issue of whether the ideological posi-
tions of all judges have shifted rightward, or the newly appointed
ones have been more rightward oriented compared to judges on ear-
lier cases. Because year fixed effects remain positive, significant,
and increasing (from 2011 onwards)—even where we account for the
fixed component of each judges’ ideology—we cannot exclude a gen-
eral conservative shift in the preferences of the entire Court, includ-
ing the judges appointed before the 2010 reforms.
Finally, the last specification replaces year fixed effects with the
dummy Break. Again, the results confirm our previous conclusions.
III. Empirical Analysis of Judicial Outcomes

In this Part, we turn from ideal points estimation to a different
empirical analysis of judicial outcomes and the specific attributes of
cases. For each decision we have in our dataset, we collected informa-
tion on individual votes as well as important characteristics of the
case, summarized in Table 5. We have information about the type of
law being challenged (criminal and military law, family law, party-
and politics-related law, economic-related law, and other laws), the
petitioner or nature of the petition (referral from a court, petition

filed by the opposition in Parliament, audit of political parties), the
time frame (decision before or after reform and duration in years),
the estimated length of the decision in pages (since there are varia-
tions in style and formatting, the number of pages is approximate),
and the attributes of the decision (favorable to constitutionality, or to
the political party in audit cases, as well as the number of dissents).
Table 6 presents the descriptive statistics for the 245 decisions.
Sixty-five decisions refer to audits of political parties and 180 decisions
to constitutional referrals and petitions (125 referrals from courts and 55
petitions from Parliament). Most decisions favor the status quo (constitu-
tionality or the political party audited), namely 180 against 65 decisions.
About one-third of these decisions have at least one dissent. Concerning
area of the law, 30% refer to political issues (including audits of politi-
cal parties), 22% to economic-related issues, 18% to criminal and mili-
tary law, 2% to family law, and 28% to other matters (such as property or
business law). The average length of a decision is nine to ten pages.
We start by investigating whether the attributes of the decision,
namely pro status quo and existence of dissent, are statistically differ-
ent before and after the 2010 reforms. We control for audit of parties
versus constitutional review. Although the number of dissents and pro
status quo decisions increase after the 2010 reforms, Table 7 suggests
no strong statistical effect. Therefore, we do not detect any significant
change in patterns of pro status quo and existence of dissent.
The numbers are also in line if we look at petitions filed by the
parliamentary opposition only, as we do in Table 8. These petitions are
particularly salient since they challenge legislation adopted by the gov-
erning AKP, which spearheaded the 2010 reforms to the TCC. Although
the number of decisions that reject petitions by the parliamentary oppo-
sition increase following the reforms, the increase appears negligible.
We proceed to correlation analysis. A few relevant correlations
are summarized in Table 9. Duration has a strong negative corre-
lation with the after reform variable (which could be an immediate
result of our time frame); length of judgment has a positive corre-
lation with after reform (the estimated number of pages seems to
increase after the 2010 reforms); length also has a strong positive
correlation with dissent (which is easy to understand since dissents
naturally make opinions longer, on average). Confirming the previ-
ous analysis, we find no correlation between the attributes of the
decision (pro status quo and dissent) and the 2010 reforms.
We conclude the empirical analysis of the aggregate dataset by
developing probit regressions. The dependent variables are the attri-
butes of the decision (pro status quo and the existence of dissent),
both bivariate variables, and hence the option for a probit method.
We also consider duration as a possible variable of interest; however,
for this analysis, we develop an ordinary least squares regression.
Table 5. Datasets.
Macro Dataset

Variable
Cmil Criminal and military law
Fam Family law
Pol Party and politics law (including broadcast law)
Economic Economic-related law
Court Courts referral
Oppos Opposition petition
Audit Audit parties
After After reform
Pro Pro status quo (pro constitutionality or pro party in audit)
Dissent At least one dissent
Duration Duration (in years)
Length Estimated length (in pages)
Micro Dataset
Variable
Cmil Criminal and military law
Fam Family law
Pol Party and politics law (including broadcast law)
Economic Economic-related law
Court Courts referral
Oppos Opposition petition
Audit Audit parties
After After reform
Dissent At least one dissent
Length Estimated length (in pages)
Gender Male
Age Age at time of decision
Time Judicial length of time at court
Pres Judge chosen by the president (without nomination by other body)
Par Judge chosen by parliament
Judge Judge with background as judge
Lawprof Judge with background as law professor
Military Judge with military background
Due to the possible lack of independence of decisions in reference

to the same case, we cluster all regressions by decisions (135 when
audit cases are excluded and 200 when audit cases are included).
The regression results confirm that the 2010 reforms do not signal
any statistically significant change in pro status quo decisions and
the existence of dissent (see Appendix I).
Table 6. Descriptive Statistics Macro Dataset.

Zero/No Ones/Yes Mean SD Total

Cmil 202 43 0.18 0.38 245
Fam 239 6 0.02 0.16 245
Pol 171 74 0.30 0.46 245
Economic 191 54 0.22 0.42 245
Court 120 125 0.51 0.51 245
Oppos 190 55 0.22 0.42 245
Audit 180 65 0.27 0.42 245
After 114 131 0.53 0.50 245
Pro 65 180 0.73 0.44 245
Dissent 163 82 0.33 0.47 245
Duration 2.09 1.94 245
Length 9.55 12.05 245
Table 7. Contingency Tables.

Without audit With audit
Dissent Before After Before After
Total Total
Reform Reform Reform Reform
Yes 31 (40%) 45 (44%) 76 31 (27%) 45 (34%) 76
No 46 (60%) 58 (56%) 104 83 (73%) 86 (66%) 169
Total 77 103 114 131
Without audit With audit

Pro Before After Before After
Total Total
Yes 55 (71%) 80 (78%) 135 82 (72%) 98 (75%) 180
No 22 (29%) 23 (22%) 45 32 (28%) 33 (25%) 65
Total 77 103 114 131
IV. Empirical Analysis of Individual Votes

In this Part, we focus on individual votes and possible judicial
attributes. The characteristics of judges and cases are summarized
in Table 5, as explained above. For each judge, we have information
on their gender, age at time of decision, length of time on the bench,
nominating body (the President or Parliament, where appointment
by the President after nomination from a different body works as the
benchmark), and background (career judge, law professor, military
career).82 The number of individual votes and dissents is summa-
rized in Table 1 as discussed in Part II.
82. These backgrounds are not mutually exclusive.

Table 8. Further Contingency Table.

Petitions from Opposition Only, Pro

Before Reform After Reform Total
Yes 13 (62%) 27 (79%) 40
No 8 (38%) 7 (21%) 15
Total 21 34 55
Table 9. Partial Correlations.

Duration Length After Pro Dissent
Duration 1.00
Length -0.02 1.00
After -0.43 0.25 1.00
Pro -0.05 0.00 0.03 1.00
Dissent -0.10 0.25 0.06 0.03 1.00
A detailed analysis of the contingency table, shown in Table 10,

confirms the general impressions conveyed by Table 1. All seem to
indicate no statistically significant change before and after the 2010
reforms concerning judicial strategy (dissent or pro status quo).
When we classify judges by terms, there is no statistical differ-
ence concerning dissent frequencies. Female judges seem to dissent
more often, but the numbers are too low to be statistically relevant
because there are too few women on the Court. Currently, all seven-
teen judges serving on the TCC are male.
A previous regression analysis has shown that PRO (pro-con-
stitutionality decisions) is statistically random and opposition peti-
tions do not induce any statistical difference in terms of aggregate
behavior (see Appendix I). We now turn to the individual numbers
for these variables at the bottom of Table 10. Pro-constitutionality
votes seem to increase slightly after reform (confirming the previ-
ous analysis). This seems driven by judges who were appointed after
the reforms, but again, the effect is too modest to produce statistical
significance.
Table 11 introduces the correlation analysis. Judicial profiles
seem uncorrelated with dissent (we have not looked at gender given
the few number of women). However, certain variables are interesting
and indicate some trends. Judges appointed by either the President
or Parliament are younger (a likely consequence of change to the
appointments system), and law professors on the Court are younger
while career judges are older (in reference to age at time of decision).
In order to make our empirical analysis complete, we ran five
probit regressions. We started with a simple probit, without fixed
effects, where dissent is the dependent variable. We then added the
existence of dissents in the panel, which of course is problematic due
Table 10. Contingency Table.

Dissent Without audit With audit

Before After Total Before After Total
Yes 89 (11%) 175 (11%) 264 89 (11%) 175 (11%) 264
No 740 (89%) 1,415 (89%) 2,155 750 (89%) 1,467 (89%) 2,217
Total 829 1,590 839 1,642
Dissent Before Dissent After Total
Judges on both 51/404 (13%) 80/1,015 (8%) 131/1,389

periods
Judges appointed 0 45/477 (9%) 45/477

after reform
Judges retired 88/615 (14%) 0 88/615

before reform
Total 139/1,019 125/1,492 264/2,481
Dissent No Dissent Total
Male 210 (10%) 1,984 (90%) 2194
Female 54 (19%) 233 (81%) 287
Total 264 2,217 2,481
Pro Before Reform After Reform Total
Judges on 165/224 (74%) 724/1,165 (62%) 889/1,389

both periods
Judges appointed 396/477 (83%) 396/477

after reform
Judges retired 458/615 (74%) 458/615

before reform
Total 623/839 1,120/1,642 1,743/2,481
Favorable to Favorable to Total

Opposition Petitions Opposition Petitions
Before Reform After Reform
Judges on both 37/93 (40%) 46/327 (14%) 83/420

periods
Judges appointed 5/166 (3%) 5/166

after reform
Table 11. Partial Correlations.

Dissent Age Time Pres Par Judge Lawprof Military

Dissent 1.00
Age 0.08 1.00
Time 0.03 0.60 1.00
Pres −0.06 −0.23 0.25 1.00
Par 0.02 −0.28 −0.22 −0.14 1.00
Judge 0.04 0.22 −0.17 −0.25 −0.08 1.00
Lawprof −0.02 −0.30 −0.07 −0.14 −0.10 −0.40 1.00
Military −0.01 −0.08 −0.23 0.05 0.24 0.19 −0.16 1.00
to the potential collinearity effect. We then reran the simple probit

but with fixed effects per judge (only judges with a relevant num-
ber of observations since many have too many zeros). Finally, we ran
another probit for a subset of decisions with at least one dissent (for
a total of 1,050 votes and fifty-five cases only). The regressions seem
to show that the 2010 reforms did not statistically affect the propen-
sity to dissent. In fact, looking at the results from the probit esti-
mations, dissent seems to be explained by fixed effects (individual
characteristics of judges) and no systematic correlation is found (see
Appendix II).
Discussion of Results and Conclusion

According to the ideal points estimation, the 2010 reforms
represented a significant break in the ideological position of
the Court. The Court has shifted, and continues to shift, to the
right. This shift has likely resulted from the changes to the
Court’s structure and appointments process. Although the judges
appointed after the 2010 reforms may have been responsible for
the rightward ideological drift, we cannot exclude the possibility
of a general shift to the right on the Court because the year fixed
effects are significant and positive, and are increasing in magni-
tude with time. The ideological shift is consistent with the agency
theory of judicial review, which argues that judicial preferences,
though important, are implemented in light of political and insti-
tutional realities.
This ideological shift, however, has not yet translated into a
statistically significant effect in judicial outcomes. We detect no
strong effects on the incidence of dissents or the ultimate outcome
of each case (in terms of its favorability to a given status quo). This
finding is consistent with a recent empirical study that suggests
the TCC’s favorability to a given status quo depends in part on
the existence of divided government. 83 According to the study, the

Court is more likely to uphold laws under a single-party govern-
ment,84 and in the time period covered by our dataset, Parliament

was controlled by a single dominant party (the AKP). There are also
no major changes after the 2010 reforms in the degree of polariza-
tion or fragmentation on the Court. Despite the demonstrated ideo-
logical rightward shift, judicial practice has not been significantly
altered.
The likely explanation for this anomaly is that it is too soon
to detect statistically significant changes in judicial practice.
There is significant overlap between the judges that served on
the Court before and after the 2010 reforms. When the size of the
TCC increased from eleven to seventeen in 2010, the AKP govern-
ment was unable to immediately fill the six new seats. Rather,
four judges that were serving as substitutes on the eleven-member
Court became permanent members. As a result, our analysis may
present the beginning of a trend that may portend future, statisti-
cally significant changes in the TCC’s judicial practice, barring any
significant future changes to the ideology of the relevant political
actors involved in the appointments process. This is particularly
likely to be the case given the increasing conservative shift in judi-
cial preferences on the Court that we detected in the ideal points
estimation.
Some constitutional changes are like carcinogens. They lie
dormant for a period of time before they become fully effective.
Hungary provides a comparative example. Like the AKP govern-
ment in Turkey, the Fidesz government in Hungary restructured
the Hungarian Constitutional Court. 85 The Hungarian reform
expanded the size of the Court from eleven to fifteen and allowed
appointments to the Court by a two-thirds parliamentary vote.
This arrangement abolished the multiparty agreement that used
to be necessary for nominations to the Court. But even after the
Hungarian Constitutional Court was beaten into submission, it con-
tinued to rule against the government in case after case for about
three years.86
A similar trend may develop in Turkey. As the ideological shift,
which is already increasing in magnitude over time, continues to
increase, and the current judges on the TCC are replaced by judges
appointed under the new mechanisms, statistically significant
changes in judicial practice might occur in the long term.
83. See Cakir, supra note 13.

84. Id.
85. Kim Lane Scheppele, Constitutional Coups and Judicial Review: How
Transnational Institutions Can Strengthen Peak Courts at Times of Crisis (With
Special Reference to Hungary), 23 Transnat’l L. & Contemp. Probs. 51 (2014).
86. Id.
Appendix I. Regressions of Aggregate Data

The odd-numbered columns present the results when the data

on the audit of political parties is excluded, and the even-numbered
columns show the results when the entire dataset is used. The
results do not seem to vary with the inclusion or exclusion of audit
decisions.
The first and second columns indicate that pro status quo deci-
sions are statistically random and unrelated to the 2010 reforms.
The third and fourth columns illustrate that dissent is statistically
less likely with economic-related laws and more likely when the
opinion is longer. The fifth and sixth columns conclude that duration
is affected by criminal and military law (negative effect), length (pos-
itive effect), and the 2010 reforms (negative effect).
Variable Probit Pro Probit Probit Probit OLS OLS

(Excludes Pro Dissent Dissent (All Duration Duration
Audit) (All Dataset) (Excludes Dataset) (Excludes (All
Audit) Audit) Dataset)
Cmil 0.185 −0.012 −0.448 −0.359 −0.611** −0.596**
Pol −0.143 0.077 0.028 −0.27 0.29 0.348
Economic 0.079 0.075 −0.54** −0.542** 0.057 0.093
Oppos −0.037 −0.109 −0.39 −0.36 −0.612 −0.685*
Audit −0.209 −1.011** 0.926
After 0.438 0.055 −0.203 −0.178 −1.72*** −1.733***
Pro 0.023 0.79 0.354* −0.078
Dissent 0.036 0.069 −0.14 −0.127
Duration 0.142* −0.016 −0.056 −0.34
Length −0.003 −0.001 0.022** 0.022*** 0.036*** 0.041***
Constant 0.172 0.661** 0.104 0.002 2.334*** 2.614***
Number Obs 180 245 180 245 180 245
Clusters 135 200 135 200 135 200
(Pseudo) R2 0.02 0.005 0.06 0.133 0.34 0.326
Log Pseudo −99.06 −140.98 −115.18 −135.45

Likelihood
Statistically significant at 1% (***), 5% (**), 10% (*).
Appendix II. Regressions of Individual Data
Variable Probit Probit Vote Probit Vote Probit Vote

Vote with Dissent with Fixed with Dissent
Effects per Only and Fixed
Judge Effects per Judge
Cmil 0.119 0.454** 0.192 0.296*
Pol 0.12 −0.054 −0.11 −0.001
Economic −0.14 0.077 −0.138 0.181
Oppos −0.217 −0.002 −0.17 0.088
Audit −0.366 −0.503** −0.308
After 0.053 0.169 0.223 0.056
Dissent 1.478***
Length 0.008 −0.002 0.008 −0.001
Gender −0.307*** −0.365*** −0.834 −0.952
Age 0.028*** 0.033*** 0.02 0.077
Time −0.006 −0.008 −0.056 −0.061
Pres −0.092 −0.088 −0.517 −0.031
Par 0.251** 0.233 −0.362 −0.243
Judge 0.011 −0.018 0.426 0.726
Lawprof 0.118 0.124 0.64 0.691
Military −0.017 0.019 0.457 0.785
Constant −2.615*** −3.908*** −1.848 −4.835*
Number Obs 2481 2481 2481 1050
Clusters 147 147 147 59
(Pseudo) R2 0.03 0.215 0.064 0.09
Log Pseudo −812.98 −659.98 −787.53 −512.68

Likelihood
Statistically significant at 1% (***), 5% (**), 10% (*).

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