The judicial power to review the constitutionality of laws was a unique feature of American constitutionalism well into the twentieth century. The perceived success of this experiment in limited democracy prompted several nations, among them West Germany, to create courts of constitutional review in the aftermath of World War II. Now several decades later, as the author of this book writes, constitutional review “has emerged as an almost universal feature of western-style democracy” (p. 1). In most of the world's advanced liberal democracies, the power to review the constitutionality of laws has been lodged in specialized courts of constitutional review, meaning that only these courts are empowered to nullify laws on constitutional grounds. Germany's Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) is one of the most notable and powerful of these specialized tribunals. It is notable for the frequency with which it has invalidated national and local laws and also for the extensive reach of its jurisdiction. Owing to the German court's rejection of any political question doctrine, together with its authority to decide with finality abstract questions of constitutional law—that is, questions raised by legislators outside the normal framework of an actual law suit—its powers of review actually exceed those of the Supreme Court. Indeed, the FCC has begun to challenge the Supreme Court as the leading model of constitutional review around the world.

For this reason, Georg Vanberg's book is a welcome addition to the literature on Germany's Federal Constitutional Court. Apart from its treatment of the FCC's founding, organization, jurisdiction, and decision-making procedures, along with a description of the judicial appointment process, this concisely written book highlights the tribunal's political role within Germany's system of separated powers. But as informed as these particular accounts are, Vandberg's main purpose is to sketch out a formal model of constitutional review. Using the experience of the FCC as the basis for developing the model, the author advances a series of hypotheses designed empirically to explain when and under what circumstances high courts of judicial review secure compliance with their decisions, especially when they nullify or qualify majoritarian public policies and likewise when legislatures are likely to reverse, modify, or evade judicial rulings on constitutionality. In short, the theory specifies the conditions under which constitutional courts influence the making of legislation and those under which legislatures influence judicial policymaking.

Reduced to its essentials, the theory postulates that constitutional judges, like other political actors, are rational calculators sensitive to the interests of governing majorities and concerned with maintaining public support for their decisions. The notion of “transparency” plays a key role in the theory, for legislative compliance with judicial decisions is said to depend on the openness of the legislative process and the clarity with which constitutional issues are understood by the public. For their part, legislators consider the “potential for a public backlash in deciding how to respond” (p. 57) to judicial rulings overturning their policies. And when they seek to evade a judicial decision, as they often do, their response will be governed by what they think the public thinks, and if they think public opinion on the matter is less than clear, they will often seek to “hide [their] evasion [of a decision] by reducing [the] transparency” of their reaction (p. 57).

Vanberg tests these hypotheses by examining the German parliament's efforts to circumvent the FCC's Classroom Crucifix and Party Finance decisions, as well as the judicial response to these parliamentary countermeasures. Brief comparative references along the way to legislative-judicial relations in other countries, including Congress's reaction to the Item Veto Case in the United States, help, he believes, to support his thesis. In short, the author sets out to build a predictive model of constitutional review that stipulates when courts are likely to veto legislative policies and when legislatures are likely to comply or evade judicial decisions. The model is designed as a general theory applicable to any study of constitutional courts and their political impact.

The sophisticated mathematical formulae advanced in this book may not be every judicial scholar's cup of tea. Yet scholars with limited mathematical literacy should nevertheless appreciate the significance of this study's basic research design and its potential for a more systematic understanding of the larger role that constitutional courts play in their respective political systems. Up to now, the comparative study of constitutional courts has fallen into three categories: freestanding single-country studies of judicial organization and constitutional review, normative studies of constitutional case law, and largely descriptive studies of cross-national influences in constitutional doctrine and policy. Legal academics, most of whom are resistant to quantitative research methods, dominate the work in all three categories. The virtue of this book is that it builds on the empirical work of comparative judicial scholars, such as Neal Tate and Alec Stone Sweet, and mainly for the purpose of offering the discipline a more systematic means of measuring the political impact of constitutional courts in both mature and transitional democracies.

Two concluding remarks will suffice, although neither should undermine the importance of this book. First, the FCC's decisions have been greeted with an extraordinary degree of compliance on the part of Germany's political establishment. In short, convergence rather than conflict has been the norm in the nation's judicial-legislative relations. Even in the crucifix and party finance cases—the decisions at the heart of this study—the relation between court and parliament was one more of dialogue than of defiance or evasion. The party finance decisions, in particular, can easily be seen as a legislative-judicial partnership in the making of constitutional policy. The German as well as the American experience shows that legislative responses to judicial decisions are less often acts of defiance than efforts to encourage a rethinking of constitutional policies. Second, and relatedly, the present analysis might have drawn more heavily from Walter Murphy's Elements of Judicial Strategy (1964) and Congress and the Court (1962). Elements is mentioned in a footnote; the latter is not mentioned at all. Both books, however, are “must” reads for any political scientist engaged in the study of judicial-legislative relationships.