Mariana Llanos, Cordula Tibi Weber, Charlotte Heyl, and Alexander Stroh, “Informal Interference in the Judiciary in New Democracies: A Comparison of Six African and Latin American Cases.” Democratization, vol. 23, no. 7 (2016): 1236–53.
Summary: This article focuses on the efforts of power holders – at the executive or the legislative level – to influence or curb court activity informally or extra-legally, an acknowledged but under-researched topic in studies of judicial politics. The authors first define informal judicial interference and operationalize the concept; they then explain how they collected information on the topic through systematic cross-country interviewing. Their concept focuses on judicial intervention actions exercised by political actors once judges are on the bench. The authors distinguish these actions according to type – direct or subtle – and further differentiate each type according to six different modes. They provide new empirical data on informal interference in six third-wave democracies, three in Africa (Benin, Madagascar, and Senegal) and three in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay). Empirical findings, first, confirm the importance of informal practices in shaping political-judicial relations. Second, they point to long-standing legacies and to the level of socio-economic development as possible explanations for different performances in terms of the prevalence and severity of informal interference in the judiciary in these newly established democratic regimes