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Mauricio Mandujano Manriquez

Researcher - ARENA Centre for European Studies

Email m.m.manriquez@arena.uio.no

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Visiting address Gaustadalléen 30A 2. etasje 0373 Oslo

Postal address Postboks 1143 Blindern 0318 Oslo

Other affiliations Faculty of Social Sciences (Student)

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Academic interests

EU Politics
Judicial Politics
Comparative Politics
Quantitative and Data Science Methods

Mauricio Mandujano's research focuses on the interaction between the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Commission in relation to the violations of the rule of law and the core principles of EU membership. Specifically, he investigates the rationale behind the mercurial deployment of tools by the EU in response to rule of law breaches in Hungary and Poland after 2010 within the purview of the ENROL project .

Additionally, his broader interests include the evolutionary trajectories of political systems, democratic institutions, and data science. Leveraging insights from political theory, he investigates how specific institutions such as courts, electoral systems, and legislatures evolve across time and space through scientific research designs. That is: how do sets of institutional arrangements vary in their performance across democratic polities? As for data science, he combines empirical research on democracy and novel data processing techniques.

Courses taught

Has taught lectures or seminars for:

Background

Mauricio graduated from Leiden University, the Netherlands, with an Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters in European Politics and Society and from the Tecnológico de Monterrey , Mexico, with a BA in International Relations. Also, he is a regular commentator on European and International Affairs for venues including European Waves and the Loop: ECPR and a recurring guest lecturer at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico.

Tags: EU, rule of law, CJEU, Comparative Politics, Quantitative methods

Manriquez, Mauricio Mandujano & Pavone, Tommaso (2024). Follow the leader: the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the EU's rule of law revolution. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2024.2336125. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
The autocratization of Hungary and Poland prompted a revolution in the European Court of Justice (ECJ)'s caselaw. Brick by brick, the ECJ imposed novel obligations on EU member states to safeguard the rule of law while expanding the legal bases for the EU to sanction governments breaching the Union's fundamental values. In this article, we ask whether the ECJ pioneered this rule of law revolution or, conversely, whether the Court responded to an entrepreneurial European Commission acting as ‘guardian of the Treaties’. While supranationalist theories depict the Commission as a proactive agenda-setter guiding the Court's innovations, studies of the EU's rule of law crisis argue that the Commission dragged its feet or only recently seized the reins of leadership. Which perspective is closer to the mark? Deploying a new theoretical framework to study judicial innovation and agenda-setting on an original dataset of all rule of law cases adjudicated by the ECJ from 2010 through 2023, we demonstrate that the Commission has been an inconsistent and often indifferent agenda-setter. Besides several proactive interventions limited to the latter years of the Juncker Commission, the Court's innovative rulings prompted the Commission to act more than the reverse, belying a fundamental shift in leadership.

View all works in NVA

Manriquez, Mauricio Mandujano (2026). Finding Law: Organized Interests and the Confinement of Executive Primacy - Conference Presentation. Full text in Research Archive
Manriquez, Mauricio Mandujano (2025). The Apex Court’s Dilemma: Rulemaking Alignment Under Hierarchical and Political Constraints - Conference Presentation. doi: https:/mauriciomm7.github.io/assets/files/2025apsa_slides.pdf. Full text in Research Archive
Manriquez, Mauricio Mandujano (2026). Finding Law: Organized Interests and the Confinement of Executive Primacy. APSA Preprints. doi: 10.33774/apsa-2026-zcqv9. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Filing written observations before the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is a key channel through which private actors, national governments, and the European Commission shape legal rules. While the Commission’s legal service has historically asserted interpretive primacy as “guardian of the Treaties,” recent scholarship highlights the influence of member states and private litigants. This article asks: under what conditions do private actors and governments displace the Commission as the main source of court rulemaking? Using newly available full-text observations from 2022–2025, I measure whose proposals—Commission, member states, or private parties—most closely match the Court’s operative part. Results indicate that the Commission’s presumed interpretive dominance no longer holds. Member states are nearly as likely as the Commission to propose rules closest to the Court’s reasoning, while private actors’ proposals are closest in over one-third of cases, though individual rights claimants are less successful.
Manriquez, Mauricio Mandujano (2025). The Apex Court’s Dilemma: Rulemaking Alignment Under Hierarchical and Political Constraints. APSA Preprints. doi: 10.33774/apsa-2025-d4nld. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Under what conditions do apex courts align with lower courts in constructing legal rules? Many theories have modeled how judicial hierarchies influence apex court rulemaking and how these courts adapt to external political pressures. However, prioritization between these competing demands remains unclear. This article examines this tension by investigating how the European Court of Justice's operating conditions influence its alignment with domestic court referrals through legal bases adoption. Using a dataset of over 5,000 referral applications (2008-2023), I employ a causal identification to disentangle effects of hierarchical disengagement, political constraints, and legal information. Contrary to prevailing theory, the chief mechanism by which member states induce misalignment is not credible override threats but provision of alternative legal options. While domestic high court disengagement pressures consistently exert positive effects, they are outweighed by opposing misalignment effects of alternatives. These findings suggest apex court responsiveness to judicial hierarchies is constrained by institutional design.