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Judicial governance is becoming one of the central topics of political discussion in

many European countries. In Spain, the renewal of members of the Consejo General

del Poder Judicial-the Spanish judicial council-has in the last years become one

of the main elements of tension between government and opposition. Until recently,

Finland was an outlier in the Nordic context, but the creation of the National Court

Administration has recently ended this situation. In Poland, judicial governance is at

the core of a process of rule of law deterioration which has been thoroughly analysed

in the academic literature.1

All these cases, though radically different from one another, have something in

common. They show the importance that mechanisms for judicial governance are

acquiring in contemporary European democracies. They illustrate that these mechanisms

are integrated into power dynamics between government and opposition,

between branches of government, and even between the national and supranational

levels of governance. Contemporary European democracies, both when they are

healthy and when they decay, cannot be understood anymore without analysing the

role played by institutions such as judicial councils and courts services. This book is

precisely about judicial goverance and its relationship with democracy as a system of

government.

More specifically, this book investigates the relationship between judicial governance

and democratic quality. It seeks to make a contribution to our understanding

of how different designs of judicial governance relate to the quality of democracy in

European countries. Relying on a dataset of 46 European countries, the book uses

different methodological tools to investigate this relationship. The analysis underlines

the complexity of the relationship between judicial governance and democratic

quality in Europe. Such relationships are nuanced, and often differ from country to

country..