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Measuring Judicial Ideology in Economic Cases: An Expert Crowdsourcing Design

Assessing how personal attributes such as ideology influence judicial behaviour is often made difficult by the unavailability of votes and other common proxies for judicial preferences. We present an alternative measurement approach designed to leverage the knowledge of legal experts. We ask EU competition law experts to rate General Court judges on a number of dimensions and then use these ratings to construct judicial scores for Europhilia, competition law expertise and business-friendliness. We show that, unlike Europhilia and competition law expertise, the pro-business score of the panel median is a significant predictor of General Court decisions in competition and state aid cases. Our analysis suggests that expert ratings constitute a viable and promising alternative in settings where other measurement methods are unavailable.