Supreme Court Stability in Latin America

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates the foundations of judicial independence in new democracies and the conditions under which the Executive Branch is able to manipulate the composition of the Supreme Court in order to secure a loyal judiciary. This project will measure and explain presidential encroachment on the judiciary by analyzing the stability in office of Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal members in 18 Latin American countries. Studies of judicial politics in new democracies have shown that presidents often force the resignation of adversarial Supreme Court members or "pack" the Supreme Court with loyalists. However, historical and comparative studies of this problem are rare, leaving our understanding of executive-judicial relations lacking. With the assistance of a research team, the PI will collect data on members of every Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal in Latin America (plus the U.S. Supreme Court, as a benchmark) between 1945 and 2007. Using this information, the PI will then model the probability that a justice will exit the Court as a function of partisan changes in the Executive Branch plus a battery of controls. He hypothesizes that partisan realignments in the Executive Branch will have an impact on the composition of high courts when presidents have both the institutional incentives and the power to reshuffle the judiciary. In order to capture variance in the impact of presidential incentives and powers across countries, the model employ hierarchical and latent class statistical models.