While judicial independence is often considered to be a foundation for the rule of law and economic prosperity, there is overwhelming evidence suggesting that judges and court decision-making are sensitive to the political environment. In this paper, we explore one channel through which political alignment of the judges can manifest itself and verify whether political party support, expressed as a recommendation to the tribunal, is relevant for the allocation of judges to adjudication panels. Our specific example comes from the Polish Constitutional Tribunal and refers to the period 2005-2014. With respect to the mass of filed cases, we do not find that allocation of judges to adjudication panels favored nominees of any political party. Our results however provide support for the strategic selection to adjudication panels in politically sensitive cases in the period 2011-2014. We find that nominees of the governing party were allocated to these panels more often than other members of the tribunal and that in these cases they had more voting power than in cases of lower political clout.

尽管通常认为司法独立是法治和经济繁荣的基础，但大量证据表明，法官和法院的决策对政治环境敏感。在本文中，我们探索了一种渠道，法官可以通过这种渠道表现出自己的政治立场，并验证作为对法庭的推荐而表达的政党支持是否与法官分配给审判小组有关。我们的具体示例来自波兰宪法法庭，涉及2005-2014年。关于提起的案件数量，我们发现法官分配到审判小组并不偏爱任何政党的候选人。但是，我们的结果为2011-2014年期间对政治敏感案件的审判小组的战略选择提供了支持。我们发现，执政党的提名人比法庭的其他成员被分配给这些小组的频率更高，在这种情况下，他们的投票权比在政治影响力较低的情况下更大。