October 28, 2026 | Noon
Daniel Brinks (University of Texas at Austin)
By: Daniel M. Brinks and Guillermo Pérez
Abstract: In spite of an extensive body of research on the effects of various institutional arrangements on our politics, the case of constitutional courts remains curiously undecided. Much of the research on high courts assumes they are all the same, and finds either that they matter in various ways, or that they don’t matter very significantly ever. The limited research that looks at specific institutional designs concludes that design doesn’t matter, or even has the opposite effect of what we would expect, or that it actually does matter, but only in specific configurations. The most consistent finding is that either political fragmentation or political uncertainty – and these two concepts are often conflated – helps courts be more consequential. But even this finding is often questioned, and there is research that finds that in certain contexts these variables have the opposite effect. In response to this uncertainty, we develop a contextual institutionalist theory that explains just how political fragmentation – not uncertainty – interacts with institutional design to produce important effects for the functioning of high courts with constitutional attributes. We examine the implications of the theory on a database that codes the institutional design of all courts in Latin America on an annual basis since 1975. We show that differences in institutional design interact with the the partisan structure of a country to produce differences in important outcomes for courts, like judicial independence as measured by the V-Dem experts, or the level of conflict between the court and the executive, or the propensity of governments to purge the courts.
The project is in its very early stages, and we very much welcome comments, critiques, and suggestions.