(iPoster) Compliance with Judicial Decisions in New Democracies

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Law and Courts & Elections and Voter Behavior
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Law and Courts

Abstract

Courts across democracies have acquired expansive formal powers of judicial review, yet compliance with their rulings has not increased in tandem. Despite this gap, much comparative judicial scholarship continues to infer judicial power from institutional authority rather than from observed obedience to court decisions. This article shifts the focus from judicial empowerment to judicial compliance. It theorizes compliance as a joint outcome of judicial decision design and litigant implementation capacity, embedded within an integrated decision-making process that includes courts, bureaucracies, and private actors. I argue that compliance is systematically shaped by the clarity of court orders, the presence of monitoring mechanisms, implementation costs, and the administrative and organizational capacity of state and non-state litigants. To test these claims, I estimate hierarchical bivariate probit models with sample selection using an original dataset of constitutional and high court rulings from Colombia and Ecuador between 2012 and 2025. The analysis relies on NLP techniques to extract information on reparatory mandates, litigant characteristics, and judicial monitoring provisions directly from court decisions. The quantitative findings are complemented by paired case studies of two paradigmatic cases on each court. Together, the results show that clear rulings and high compliance capacity significantly increase the likelihood of implementation, while vague mandates and weak enforcement environments undermine compliance even when courts possess strong formal authority. By foregrounding compliance rather than institutional power, incorporating non-state actors, and combining automated text analysis with comparative case studies, this article advances a more empirically grounded account of judicial influence in new democracies.

Author

• Pablo Valdivieso Kastner, University of Oxford