Etienne Hanelt and Attila Vincze,“Managing Courts In Competitive Authoritarian Regimes: Co-Optation, Repression And Resistance In Hungary.” Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft (2025): 1-20. Summary: This chapter investigates how attorneys, particularly judges, navigate judicial backsliding in Hungary’s competitive authoritarian regime. Despite formal guarantees of judicial independence, the government has implemented strategic reforms to control the judiciary while maintaining …
Dilek Kurban, “Authoritarian Resistance and Judicial Complicity: Turkey and the European Court of Human Rights.” European Journal of International Law, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2024): 355–387 Summary: International courts face growing contestations to their authority. Scholars have conceptualized the forms and grounds of such resistance as well as the response of international courts. Yet, in focusing …
Marny A. Requa, “A Human Rights Triumph? Dictatorship-era Crimes and the Chilean Supreme Court.” Human Rights Law Review, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2012): 79–106 Summary: This article assesses the dramatic shift in Chilean Supreme Court jurisprudence toward accountability for crimes committed during the dictatorship and sets it within the context of judicial reform and political …
Sivaram Cheruvu and Jay N. Krehbiel, “Do Citizens in Backsliding Democracies Support International Courts’ Judicial Power? Evidence from Hungary.” Journal of Law and Courts, vol. 13, no. 1 (2025): 148–65. Summary: International courts are increasingly serving as bulwarks of democracy. These courts, however, often depend on the cooperation of the very governments they seek to …
Martín Gandur, Taylor Kinsley Chewning, and Amanda Driscoll, “Awareness of Executive Interference and the Demand for Judicial Independence: Evidence from Four Constitutional Courts.” Journal of Law and Courts, vol. 13, no. 1 (2025): 122–47. Summary: Awareness of courts has long been theorized to engender enhanced support for judicial independence, but this is a logic that …
Taraleigh Davis, “The ‘Case’ for Independent Courts: The Insurance Theory of Judicialization in Autocracies.” Journal of Law and Courts, vol. 13, no. 1 (2025): 35–50. Summary: Why would authoritarian rulers allow for an independent judiciary that could constrain their power? This study extends the insurance theory of judicial independence to autocratic contexts, arguing that when …
Azul A. Aguiar Aguilar, Rodrigo Castro Cornejo, Alejandro Monsiváis-Carrillo, “Is Mexico at the Gates of Authoritarianism?” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 36, no.1 (2025): 50-64. Summary: Mexico might be on the verge of becoming one of the latest additions to the list of competitive authoritarian regimes. By the end of the term of President Andrés Manuel …
Lauren A. McCarthy, “Oversight of the Legal System in an Authoritarian Regime: Police and Court Monitoring in Russia.” Journal of Law and Courts, vol. 13, no. 1 (2025): 195-219. Summary: How can citizens in authoritarian regimes exercise oversight of the legal system? McCarthy examines police and court monitoring, bottom-up oversight activities popular in pre-war Russia …
Michael A. Dichio, “Stewards, defenders, progenitors, and collaborators: Courts in the age of democratic decline.” Law and Policy, vol. 47, no. 1 (2025): e12251. Summary: In this introductory essay to the special issue of Law & Policy, “Global Perspectives on Judicial Politics and Democratic Backsliding,” Dichio critically examines the paradoxical role of courts during episodes …
Berk Esen, “Judicial transformation in a competitive authoritarian regime: Evidence from the Turkish case.” Law and Policy, vol. 47, no.1 (2025): e12250. Summary: What accounts for the variation in the judiciary’s ability to serve as a democratic guardrail under populist rule? This article contends that populist governments use judicial activism against their political agenda to …