Loyalty to the party or loyalty to the party leader: Evidence from the Spanish Constitutional Court

Abstract

In a recent article, Epstein and Posner (2016) make an important distinction between ideological alignment and personal loyalty to the appointer. We use constitutional adjudication at the Spanish Constitutional Court to test for this distinction. We consider all constitutional review decisions in cases initiated by explicit political actors (recursos de constitucionalidad) from 1980 to 2018 (removal of Mariano Rajoy as prime minister); a total of 8675 individual votes by constitutional judges in reference to 773 decisions taken by the Spanish Constitutional Court. The results obtained are consistent with a personal loyalty effect. Decomposition by nonunanimous decisions and appointing bodies do not undermine the statistical significance of an effect coherent with personal loyalty. However, the results indicate that the effect seems to be stronger more recently and for Zapatero's appointees, in a period dominated by the financial crisis and the Catalan political situation.