Normprövning : En prövning för politisk tillit?

Sammanfattning

Judicial review (Normprövning) is the ability of courts to invalidate or override legislation that comes in conflict with the national constitution. Some argue that judicial review is a democracy problem since the decision whether the proposed legislation violates the constitution is made by non-elected judges. Thus, the result of judicial review is failed policy implementation. The political science research emphasizes the representative institutions and their performance as a crucial ingredient for increased political trust. Because of the findings in prior research, failed policy implementation due to judicial review should be associated with decreasing political trust. This thesis aims to investigate and analyze the association between judicial review and political trust. Additionally, the thesis aims to investigate whether this association is affected by education level. By using a multiple regression and a moderation analysis, this thesis analyses survey responses from almost 47000 respondents in the European Social Survey in relation to Varieties of Democracy’s judicial review index. The results show a weak negative statistically significant association between judicial review and political trust. Education level is shown to have no moderation effect at all. However, the marginal effect of higher level of education is also negative but with weak statistical significance. The weak significance entails that there are difficulties to generalize even though results somewhat implies that a greater degree of judicial review is associated with decreased political trust.