Is the Spanish Constitutional Court an instrument of the central government against the Autonomous Communities?

This paper applies various probit/logit models to a database constructed by the authors, consisting of rulings by the Spanish Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional, TC) resolving positive conflicts of competence between the central government and the Autonomous Communities from 1981 to 2014. Our goal is to empirically contrast whether the TC is predisposed to favour the central government or if their rulings are determined by other motivations. According to the results we have obtained, the TC does not seem to be an extension in the jurisdictional milieu of the central executive power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]