Follow the Leader: The European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the EU’s Rule of Law Revolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The autocratization of Hungary and Poland prompted a revolution in the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) caselaw. The Court imposed novel obligations on member states to safeguard the rule of law (ROL) and expanded the legal bases for the EU to sanction governments. We ask: did the ECJ pioneer this ROL revolution or respond to an entrepreneurial European Commission acting as “guardian of the Treaties?” While supranationalist theories depict the Commission as a proactive agenda-setter, studies of the EU’s ROL crisis argue that the Commission dragged its feet or only recently seized the reins of leadership. Deploying a new theory of judicial innovation and agenda-setting on an original dataset of all ROL cases adjudicated by the ECJ, we demonstrate that the Commission has been an inconsistent and often indifferent agenda-setter. Besides several proactive interventions during the Juncker Commission, the Court’s rulings prompted the Commission to act more than the reverse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".