Gretchen Helmke, “Public Support and Judicial Crises in Latin America.” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, vol. 13, no. 2 (2010): 397-411
Summary: How do courts establish their power? What conditions undermine it? The answer hinges on how aligned judges are with public opinion. Drawing on the history of the United States Supreme Court, judicial power waxes when judges can discern and are willing to match the larger trends in the public mood, and wanes otherwise. To the extent that courts can build a supportive constituency, they will be able to deflect potential challenges to their power. Helmke applies this thesis to a part of the world where courts are widely considered to be weak and unstable: contemporary Latin America. Although scholars lack readily available data on how specific judicial decisions map onto public opinion, the Latinobarometro gives us some sense of how public support for courts in the region has varied over time and across countries. Helmke finds that low public support for the judiciary is correlated with political attacks against judges. Indeed, low levels of legitimacy appear to have more explanatory power than several other intuitively plausible causes of judicial instability. Helmke then addresses more general questions of why support and attacks are linked and why, if public support is so central for judicial power, cultivating it often proves elusive.