Supreme Court Stability in Latin America

该项目调查了新民主国家司法独立的基础，以及行政部门能够操纵最高法院组成的条件，以确保一个忠诚的司法机构。该项目将通过分析18个拉美国家的大法院和宪法裁判所法官的职务稳定性，来衡量和解释总统对司法的侵犯。对新兴民主国家司法政治的研究表明，总统经常迫使敌对的最高法院成员辞职，或者在最高法院“塞满”忠诚的人。然而，对这一问题的历史研究和比较研究很少，使我们对行政司法关系的认识有所欠缺。在一个研究小组的协助下，PI将收集1945年至2007年间拉丁美洲每个最高法院和宪法法庭（加上美国最高法院，作为基准）成员的数据。利用这些信息，PI将根据行政部门的党派变化加上一系列控制措施，对法官离开法院的可能性进行建模。他假设，行政部门的党派重组将对高等法院的组成产生影响，因为总统既有制度上的激励，又有权力重组司法机构。为了捕捉各国总统激励和权力影响的差异，该模型采用了等级和潜在阶级统计模型。

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.