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Insecure Institutions

A Survivalist Theory of Judicial Manipulation in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Gretchen Helmke ,
Yeonkyung Jeong  and
Jae-Eun C. Kim
Gretchen Helmke*
Affiliation:
University of Rochester, USA
Yeonkyung Jeong
Affiliation:
University of Rochester, USA
Jae-Eun C. Kim
Affiliation:
University of Rochester, USA
*
Contact the corresponding author, Gretchen Helmke, at gretchen.helmke@rochester.edu.
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Abstract

Most theories of judicial politics are built around explaining the puzzle of judicial independence. This article instead theorizes explicitly about the conditions under which politicians are prone to manipulate their courts. By positing that courts can partly endogenously shape leaders’ fate at the hands of legislative opponents, we argue that greater political insecurity leads presidents to gut judicial independence, not shore it up. Drawing on a novel data set of judicial crises across 18 Latin American countries following the third wave of democratization, we show that variation in judicial crises is systematically correlated with the president’s risk of nonelectoral instability as captured by the history of past presidential crises, presidential power, and antigovernmental protests. To identify whether the effects of protest on judicial manipulation are causal, we use an instrumental variable approach based on international commodity prices weighted for each country.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Fall 2022 , pp. 265 - 285
Copyright
© 2022 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference “Defending Human Rights in Times of Constitutional Crises” held in May 2018 at the University of Chicago, where participants provided invaluable feedback. We are also extremely grateful for comments from three anonymous reviewers. Replication materials are available in the JLC Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jlc.

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