Judicial (In)dependence in New Democracies. Courts, Presidents and Legislatures in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa

Theoretically, the project contributed new insights to the academic debate on judicial formal institutions, informal politics, and the role of political actors in judicial departures. Empirically, it provided original data on under-researched countries in the judicial politics literature (particularly, Paraguay and the African cases in the sample).

This project adopts a cross-regional small-N comparative design. It includes six cases from two different regions. The cases belong to similar intraregional contexts in terms of culture and history, but have differential judicial independence assessments. In short, the sample includes one pair each of best-performers (Chile, Benin), medium-performers (Argentina, Senegal), and low-performers (Paraguay, Madagascar). Benin and Chile are renowned for their powerful constitutional courts and the low level of direct political interference with these courts’ actions, whereas Argentina’s and Senegal’s relatively professional judges are exposed to intermittent political interference. Weak judiciaries that face outright political influence are reported for Madagascar and Paraguay. The project collected data on constitutional and statutory norms (and the successive amendments to them) as well as on actual cases of judges’ appointments or removals, the approval of budgetary enlargements or reductions, the creation of new courts, etc. These data helped us approximate both a de jure and a de facto assessment of judicial independence.