Judicial Independence in a Competitive Authoritarian Regime

• In Event: Democratic Institutions in Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Judicial Independence is widely considered integral to democratic rule. Broadly speaking, the literature recognizes two kinds of judicial independence. External judicial independence is a quality of the judges’ decision-making process, and specifically entails that the judge can decide a case without experiencing undue interference by other governmental officials that make her decide something different than what she believes is the right decision. And internal independence is defined as the lack of undue interference on lower court judges’ decision-making process from superiors in the judicial hierarchy. Interestingly, there is a large variety of designs of judicial institutions in authoritarian and quasi-democratic regimes (see Rios and Aguilar, 2017), and their role often goes beyond facile caricatures of telephone justice (Moustafa, 2014). In particular, understanding the dynamics of judicial institutions is likely to shed light on the institutional mechanisms linked to the stability of authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian regimes.

Mexico was under a competitive authoritarian regime for seven decades. One of the institutional features that contributed to the stability of the regime was an arrangement with key groups of the ruling coalition according to which they had large power and discretion to control the organization and resources of central institutions like the judiciary and the military, while showing deference to, and protecting the interests of, the government. Whereas the dependence of the Supreme Court (the head of the judiciary) on the government – its external judicial dependence- has received much attention, the internal institutional dynamics have not. To understand what role the judiciary played in the authoritarian regime we analyze the birth and development of clientele networks within the Mexican Federal Judiciary from 1917 to 1994. During this period, the Mexican Supreme Court was formally in charge of the appointments, promotions, and sanctions of district and circuit court judges of the federal judiciary. In 1994, in the eve of the transition to democracy, a constitutional reform created a judicial council with the explicit aim of ending patronage and corruption within the judiciary. Using in-depth interviews, we explore the endurance of some of the norms that characterized the appointment and promotion of judges during the authoritarian era. We aim to account for and discuss the normative implications of this judicial institutional arrangement. We argue that on the one hand, it was an institutional arrangement critical for the stability of competitive authoritarianism in Mexico, which has been replicated in other authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian regimes. On the other hand, it illuminates the endurance of informal authoritarian institutions and the important role they can play undermining democratic consolidation.

Authors

• Andrea Pozas-Loyo, UNAM-IIJ

• Julio Rios-Figueroa, CIDE