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Law and Politics in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

A New Database on Judicial Behavior and Compliance in the IACtHR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Øyvind Stiansen ,
Daniel Naurin  and
Live Standal Bøyum
Øyvind Stiansen
Affiliation:
PluriCourts, University of Oslo
Daniel Naurin*
Affiliation:
PluriCourts, University of Oslo
Live Standal Bøyum
Affiliation:
PluriCourts, University of Oslo
*
Contact the corresponding author, Daniel Naurin, at daniel.naurin@jus.uio.no.
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Abstract

International courts are increasingly affecting domestic and international politics and are receiving increased attention in political science research. In addition to their political importance, international courts provide new opportunities for testing theories of judicial politics, yet further progress requires access to data, particularly on the courts that have so far received less scrutiny. This article introduces a new database on Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) judgments. The database contains information on case proceedings, judicial behavior, judgment content, the actors involved, and compliance with remedial orders. The current version of the database contains data on 201 IACtHR cases. We illustrate how the database can be used to address important questions in judicial politics by analyzing whether the propensity of the IACtHR to rule against a responding state correlates with the positions taken by the same state early in the proceedings before the court. We find evidence of such a relationship.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Fall 2020 , pp. 359 - 379
Copyright
© 2020 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project 223274 (PluriCourts). We are grateful to Cesare Romano for making available the case summaries prepared by the The Inter-American Court of Human Rights Project, Los Angeles, and for helpful feedback on our coding procedures. We also thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers, Cecilia Baillet, Theresa Squatrito, Andreas Føllesdal, Matthew Saul, and Leiry Cornejo Chavez for providing helpful suggestions on our codebook. Stein Arne Brekke and Ellen Emilie Henriksen provided research assistance.

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