Latin American Courts Going Public: Institutional Innovations for Social Participation in the Judicial Decision-Making Process

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In recent years Latin American constitutional and supreme courts have engaged in institutional innovations that promote the inclusion of civil society, broad interest groups, and other stakeholders in their decision-making processes. On the one hand, these institutional arrangements seek the active integration of third parties into judicial decision-making through different mechanisms, such as public hearings, monitoring commissions, or amicus curiae. On the other hand, courts promote the creation of official websites and radio and television channels, as well as the use of social media with the explicit goal of improving public knowledge, enabling debate about their work, and broadening the audiences of judicial processes. Why are Latin American courts so concerned about their public standing? What are the motivations and circumstances that have led them to adopt social participation mechanisms? Which are the effects of their use on the courts’ relationship with the public and the elected branches of government? The implementation of social participation mechanisms has a potentially strong impact on the democratic quality of court behavior and, in general, on the role of courts in democratic regimes.This political science project delineates a theoretical and methodological strategy to answer the above mentioned questions, focusing empirically on the highest courts with constitutional review powers in Latin America, a region that is pioneering in this trend. We will present the first systematic mapping of existing social participation mechanisms in judicial decision-making processes for 18 countries. We will cover the scope and intensity with which courts are using such mechanisms in practice. Fieldwork in two countries will further contribute to explaining the reasons and effects of their implementation. We assume that the different characteristics of the sociopolitical regime as well as of the judges sitting at the bench result in varying levels of court engagement in institutional innovation. Our research embraces the contribution of classical judicial politics literature, i.e. the strategic and ideational accounts. The project uses a multi-methods approach. It applies qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) for the assessment at the regional level and process tracing for the case studies. We conceive this research as a basis for future investigations within and beyond Latin America. Furthermore, we contribute to theory development by adding these novel components of court behavior today overlooked by the comparative political literature.