The judicial politics of federal relations: a scoping review

Extensive research has examined the interaction between judicial behaviour and federal dynamics. However, performing systematic comparative research in this field remains challenging. To address this, the article conducts a PRISMA scoping review to map the academic landscape of judicial politics in federal high courts. The study aims to evaluate the empirical literature on the field, identify dominant research trends, methodological biases, and theoretical gaps, and examine how federal high court adjudication shapes intergovernmental relations, thereby providing a methodological pathway and theoretical innovations to advance cross-national research. Following a three-stage protocol, we systematically searched the Web of Science. First, we defined eligibility using the PCC framework, focusing on national federal high courts and judicial politics (1900-2024). Second, a pool of 15,117 records was refined using Excel VBA for automated deduplication and keyword filtering, yielding 12,038 records. Third, a manual appraisal of titles and abstracts by two reviewers yielded a final dataset of 106 studies. These were categorized into five analytical dimensions: bibliometric and identification metadata; authorship and institutional profile; publication and editorial context; geographic and comparative scope; and theoretical and substantive content. The results reveal a significant U.S.-centric bias in academic journals, scholars' institutions, theoretical models, and case studies.