The Legacies of Judicial Instability in Latin America

Abstract

Students of institutions have identified a pattern of “serial replacement,” distinctive of Latin American countries in which institutional change has become frequent as well as radical. Patterns of serial replacement underlie well-known “traps” of de-institutionalization: military coups beget more coups, democratic breakdowns make breakdowns more likely, constitutional replacements encourage the adoption of new constitutions, inter-branch conflicts feed further conflicts, and so on. In this paper we develop a theory of serial replacement and apply it to explain cycles of judicial instability in 18 Latin American countries. Using a novel dataset covering more than 3,000 Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal justices between 1900 and 2010, we show that political attempts to reshuffle Supreme Courts and Constitutional Tribunals encourage new attemptsto to reshuffle the high courts in later years, creating a sequential pattern of judicial instability.