Manipulating Courts in New Democracies: Forcing Judges Off the Bench in Argentina by Andrea Castagnola

Author:Andrea Castagnola [Castagnola, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Caribbean & Latin American, Judicial Branch, Political Science, World, American Government, General
ISBN: 9781351986076
Google: 7DQ8DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-31T11:06:07+00:00

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4 Forcing Justices off the Bench

Empirics from the Argentinean Supreme Court

This chapter uses an original dataset from the Argentine National Supreme Court to answer two of the research questions: which factors account for the manipulation of courts? and, when is the manipulation of the courts likely to emerge? The research hypotheses discussed in the previous chapter suggests that the main political reason for explaining court manipulation is whether or not the justice shares the same political preferences as the ruling executive. In new democracies, electoral uncertainty would make executives only trust justices with similar political preferences. The empirical test of this hypothesis in a country with intra-party fragmentation, such as Argentina, would reveal the degree of trust that executives have in justices appointed by their party vis-à-vis a justice appointed by their faction. Would executives trust a justice appointed by their party, regardless of the faction, or would they prefer a justice appointed by their own faction? Regarding the timing question of the manipulation of courts, the theory of vacancy creation suggests that the manipulation of courts would follow the electoral cycle since changes in the court composition are likely to take place after a change in the ruling party of the country.

The chapter is structured in five sections. The first and second sections introduce an operational definition of the dependent variable and present the strategy for the statistical analysis. This section also uses descriptive statistics to document the repertoire of tactics for forcing judges off the bench and the different patterns associated with natural and forced retirements that justified the use of a competing risk survival model. The second section discusses the operationalization of the independent variables of the vacancy creation theory and of the other competing alternatives. The third part of the chapter presents the results of the statistical analysis for the manipulation of the National Supreme Court in Argentina. The results of the discrete time competing risk model reveals that the hazard of induced retirements increases when a new ruling party arrives in office and when the justice does not share the same political preferences as the ruling executive. Political realignments of the national government have direct consequences on the stability and independence of the justices, because the court is likely to also suffer changes in its composition. Moreover, the results suggests that a justice that is aligned with the ruling party is not necessarily free from manipulation because the hazard of induced retirements only reduces when the justice is aligned with the faction of the ruling executive. Executives are extremely selective on who gets in their inner circle of trust. The final section outlines the main findings and its implication for the theory presented.

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