Raul Sánchez Urribarri. “Authoritarian Judicial Activism: A Look at the Venezuelan Case Under Chavismo.” In Judicial Activism in Comparative Perspective, edited by Lori Hausegger and Raul Sánchez Urribarri. New York: Peter Lang, 2024. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5135508

The chapter explores instances of judicial activism in contexts of democratic backsliding, with special reference to the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ) in Venezuela during the Bolivarian Revolution (1999-Current). In this chapter, I use the notion of authoritarian judicial activism to describe instances where judicial institutions-especially courts of last resort with constitutional adjudication prerogatives-deliberately interpret constitutional and legal norms in an ‘activist’ fashion, or otherwise undertake an ‘activist’ role on behalf of an authoritarian government engaged in dismantling democracy and building an authoritarian regime. The concept of judicial activism is controversial, and refers to many different phenomena at the same time, making it a challenging (and often misguiding) concept for systematic analysis as discussed in the introductory section of this volume. However, I argue that it is precisely its polysemic nature what makes it useful as a heuristic to identify the different aspects in which a captured judiciary exercises its power to the construction of an autocratic polity, i.e., deliberately engaging in authoritarian practices, routines and institutionalization.