Courts against backsliding: Lessons from Latin America

Abstract

The recent wave of autocratization in Latin America has put courts at the center of debates about regime and regime change. Much of the literature on the judicial politics of democratic backsliding focuses on incumbents' efforts to capture judiciaries and weaponize them against the regime. Our approach is different. We provide illustrations of independent courts in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico that successfully fought back when presidents pushed for reforms that jeopardized democratic stability. With the goal of furthering our knowledge of how judges can also complicate autocratization, the paper thus focuses on a type of horizontal accountability intervention that we refer to as “constitutional balancing.” We also shed light on the reasons why constitutional balancing is well-equipped to slow down or stop backsliding via a comparison with another type of horizontal accountability intervention: public administration policing. These interventions are increasingly common in Latin America, usually in the form of high-profile corruption prosecutions. Unlike constitutional balancing, however, public administration policing has proven highly disruptive, and ultimately unable to settle regime-threatening political conflict.