Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/96497 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
GIGA Working Papers No. 245
Publisher: 
German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg
Abstract: 
This paper assesses the extent to which elected power holders informally intervene in the judiciaries of new democracies, an acknowledged but under-researched topic in studies of judicial politics. The paper first develops an empirical strategy for the study of informal interference based on perceptions recorded in interviews, then applies the strategy to six third-wave democracies, three in Africa (Benin, Madagascar and Senegal) and three in Latin America (Argentina, Chile and Paraguay). It also examines how three conditioning factors affect the level of informal judicial interference: formal rules, previous democratic experience, and socioeconomic development. Our results show that countries with better performance in all these conditioning factors exhibit less informal interference than countries with poorer or mixed performance. The results stress the importance of systematically including informal politics in the study of judicial politics.
Subjects: 
judicial politics
constitutional court
supreme court
Latin America
Francophone Africa
democratization
separation of powers
informal politics
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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