Judicialization of Politics by Elected Politicians: The Theory of Strategic Litigation

This study argues that the proximity to a general election would affect the frequency of the opposition parties’ referrals to the constitutional court. This effect is hypothesized to be conditioned on the opposition parties’ prediction of the upcoming election results. To test this theory, I constructed an original data set including all acts promulgated by Turkish Parliament and all cases that were brought to the constitutional court by the opposition parties during 1984–2011. The results show that once the opposition party believes that it will lose the election, it increases its referrals to the court as election approaches.