Judicial Review in Paraguay

• In Event: The Judiciary as a Political Institution in Latin America

Abstract

What is the role of constitutional justice in Paraguay? Paraguay presents an interesting case to study judicial review. On one hand, Paraguay has low levels of political competition and a long-lasting lack of judicial independence. Under this context the comparative literature on judicial politics would predict weak courts and a deferential judiciary to the President and Congress. However, the evidence of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court reveals a different scenario: high levels of unconstitutional rulings and judicial activism. How can we account for this counterintuitive finding? The objective of this paper is to understand this puzzle using the main contributions of the existing literature. We use a novel dataset that contains all the constitutional rulings from the Constitutional Chamber on from 1995 to 2015 to test the hypotheses. This paper would provide both a theoretical and an empirical contribution to the ongoing debate of the independence of the judiciary.

Author

• Andrea Castagnola, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT)