When do governments attack the judiciary? The explanatory power of political corruption

Aylin Aydin-Cakir and Ebru İlter Akarçay

International Review of Law and Economics, 2025, vol. 82, issue C

Abstract: In recent decades, the world has witnessed various examples of elected governments verbally attacking the judiciary, accusing judges of bias, or claiming that court decisions are politically motivated. Despite the prevalence of such court-curbing practices, we know very little about when exactly governments decide to verbally attack the judiciary. Focusing on the effect of political corruption, the objective of this study is to understand 1) whether and, if so, how corruption affects governments’ attacks on the judiciary and 2) whether and, if so, how its effect changes across different political contexts. We argue that in countries with fully or partially independent media, verbal attacks on the judiciary would increase with the level of corruption. However, in regimes where the media is not independent, political corruption would not have a significant effect on attacks on the judiciary. We conduct a time-series cross-sectional analysis across 165 countries (1991–2022) to test our hypotheses. The empirical results support our hypotheses. To better understand the causal mechanisms through which corruption and media independence together trigger governments’ verbal attacks on the judiciary, we compare the cases of Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela in the second part of the study.

Keywords: Judicial independence; Court-curbing; Corruption; Media independence; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144818825000043
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:irlaec:v:82:y:2025:i:c:s0144818825000043

DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2025.106248

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Law and Economics is currently edited by C. Ott, A. W. Katz and H-B. Schäfer

More articles in International Review of Law and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().