Do Authoritarian Successor Parties Help Independent Courts in New Democracies?

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy & Autocracy

Abstract

Scholars have debated whether authoritarian successor parties (ASPs) foster or undermine democracy in post-authoritarian states. While ASPs are often regarded as obstacles to democratic consolidation due to their authoritarian origins, recent studies posit that ASPs, if successfully reinvented to define themselves as committed democratic contenders, may contribute to robust political competition and democratic stability (e.g., Grzymała-Busse 2020, Slater & Wong 2018). This paper applies such a debate to the insurance theory of judicial independence and examines whether political competition promotes independent courts in post-authoritarian states where ASPs are politically strong. Unlike earlier studies that authoritarian inheritances in new democracies render political competition adverse to the development of judicial independence (Popova 2010, Aydin 2013), I argue that the presence of reinvented ASPs can be beneficial to judicial independence in post-authoritarian states because this situation offers a more favorable political environment for insurance logic to work. As strong ASPs constitute one of the prominent contenders in democratic contestation, robust political competition encourages incumbents to claim independent courts as political insurance to safeguard their interests under the credible threats of losing power. I test my theoretical expectation through quantitative analysis based on the large samples of post-authoritarian democracies and an in-depth case study of South Korea. Both studies suggest that a stable and robust political competition is aided by the strong presence of reinvented ASPs, thereby shaping better conditions for independent courts to develop.

Author

• Moohyung Cho, Ewha Woman's University