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Accepted Paper:

Court-executive relations in Argentina: strategic negotiations and informal institutions  
Mariana Llanos (GIGA Institute of Latin American Srudies)

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses current court-executive relations in Argentina by focusing on the inter-institutional movements around two politically crucial Supreme Court decisions taken in 2013. It provides evidence for the strategic behavior of the Argentine Supreme Court, characterized as strategic negotiation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses current court-executive relations in Argentina by focusing particularly on the inter-institutional movements around two politically crucial Supreme Court decisions taken in 2013: one against the executive's preferences (the inconstitutionality of the judicial council reform) and one in favor (the constitutionality of four articles of the media law). The paper provides evidence for the strategic behavior of the Argentine Supreme Court reconstructing the chronology of events taking place in the time span between April 2013 and the end of this year. As in the classical strategic accounts, the analysis is not limited to explaining judges' votes but to observe the several ways in which the policy preferences of other relevant actors, remarkably the executive, are being taken into account (Epstein, Knight and Martin 2003). Strategic behavior has already been marked as a prominent feature of judicial behavior in Argentina (Helmke 2005), taking the form of judicial defection which developed as a reaction to an informal institution dictating that presidents can remove incumbent judges when they come to office. This paper shows that the judges' strategic reaction to their political environment is today characterized by negotiation rather than defection, a behavior based on the informal institution that allows subtle communications between judges and politicians. If the judges' goal with defection was securing their posts, negotiations involve other individual and collective interests, such as policy, reputation, and corporatist benefits. Empirically, the paper uses newspaper archives as well as the systematic analysis of 23 interviews with actors and experts conducted in May 2013.

Panel P45
Latin American judiciaries in comparative context
  Session 1