Strategic Transparency: Selective Promotion of Corruption Cases in Argentina

• In Event: The Politics of Judicial Decision-making in the Developing World

Abstract

Previous studies show that judges often respond to the mood of aggregate public opinion and the level of transparency of the judicial process. But judges themselves can manipulate the amount of information about their cases that they make available to the public before reaching a decision, thus influencing media coverage and public opinion. The ability of manipulating the availability of information can be particularly important in corruption cases where the political nature of judicial decisions often tests the separation of powers. In this paper, we focus on the strategic behavior of the judiciary in these type of cases and study the extent to which judges disseminate information about their cases to advance their own goals, which we call strategic transparency. In contexts in which cases are at risk of being jeopardized by politicians who enjoy some control over judicial institutions, judges may publicize information to raise the cost of undue interference. Conversely, judges siding with corrupt politicians will prefer to block access to case information in the hopes of minimizing media coverage of those cases. We test these hypotheses using original data from Argentina’s federal court circuit in the city of Buenos Aires — the Comodoro Py courthouse. The twelve courts of Comodoro Py have jurisdiction over corruption cases against national-level officials or involving federal money. The Argentine Supreme Court requires federal judges to make information on corruption cases available on a public website. Importantly, although it stipulates clear criteria to define what constitutes a corruption case, judges retain broad discretion in how they classify cases. Combining the random assignment of cases to justices, an original dataset covering a total of 20,000 cases over the 2013-2017 period, and detailed information on who nominated the judge and the political allegiances of defendants, we analyze the role of political considerations in publicizing investigations by classifying them as related to corruption, therefore making information broadly available to the public and the media.

Authors

• German Feierherd, Universidad de San Andrés

• Guadalupe Tuñón, University of California, Berkeley