Jeffrey Staton

• Emory University

A growing theoretical literature identifies how the process of constitutional review shapes judicial decision-making, legislative behavior, and even the constitutionality of legislation and executive actions. However, the empirical interrogation of these theoretical arguments is limited by the absence of a common protocol for coding constitutional...

Liberal concepts of democracy envision courts as key institutions for the promotion and protection of democratic regimes. Yet social science scholarship suggests that courts are fundamentally constrained in ways that undermine their ability to do so. Recognizing these constraints, this book argues that courts can influence regime instability by aff...

Constitutions empower people to ask judges for binding orders directing state agents to remedy rights violations, but state agents do not always comply. Scholars propose that by making it easier to observe noncompliance, courts can leverage public pressure for compliance when it exists. Yet, exposure to information about noncompliance might lead in...

Do the processes states use to select judges for peak courts influence gender diversity? Scholars have debated whether concentrating appointment power in a single individual or diffusing appointment power across many individuals best promotes gender diversification. Others have claimed that the precise structure of the process matters less than fun...

Cambridge Core - American Studies - Varieties of Democracy - by Michael Coppedge

International courts have far-from-perfect records of compliance. States routinely delay the implementation of policy changes necessary to come into line with international obligations. Some judicial orders are simply ignored in their entirety. Yet judicial orders aimed at potentially recalcitrant states often vaguely express what is required and t...

Past research suggests that natural preferences for leisure influence the ways in which federal judges carry out their work. We consider the extent to which incentives for leisure reduce the speed with which judges work and the quality of their output. We take advantage of a natural experiment caused by an annual sporting event that creates differe...

At the intersection of behavioral and institutional studies of policy making lie a series of questions about how elite choices affect mass public opinion. Scholars have considered how judicial decisions—especially US Supreme Court decisions—affect individuals’ support for specific policy positions. These studies yield a series of competing findings...

We present a new cross-national measure of de facto judicial independence, which is available for 200 countries from 1948 to 2012. To do so, we introduce a statistical measurement model for uncovering latent concepts commonly encountered in time-series, cross-sectional analyses in comparative politics and international relations. Our approach addre...

In the summer of 2009, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Costa Rica began monitoring compliance with its direct orders in amparo and habeas corpus cases. The court announced the early results from its analysis at a well-attended March 2010 press conference. The president of the court promised to continue monitoring and publicizing...

In shaping constitutional courts’ jurisdictions, societies must contend with the informational challenges associated with rule making and the distributive politics of granting courts jurisdiction over administrative lawmaking. Curiously, judges are often granted jurisdiction that seems to create a tension between their ability to acquire informatio...

In the last few decades, Western governments have spent huge sums of money to promote democracy abroad. We do not know which, if any, of these programs actually work. If we cannot measure democracy in sufficient detail and with the necessary nuance, we cannot mark its progress and setbacks or affect its future course. While distinguishing the most...

We provide a conceptual map of judicial independence and evaluate the con- tent, construct, and convergent validity of 13 cross-national measures. There is evidence suggesting the validity of extant de facto measures, though their proper use requires attention to correlated patterns of measurement error and missing data. The evidence for the validi...

Do institutions designed to limit arbitrary government promote the survival of democratic regimes? Although the international effort to build the rule of law is predicated on a belief that they do, mainstream research on democratic survival typically treats institutions as epiphenomenal. We argue that institutions encourage regime survival by addre...

Although scholars have made considerable progress on a number of important research questions by relaxing assumptions commonly used to divide political science into subfields, rigid boundaries remain in some contexts. In this essay, we suggest that the assumption that international politics is characterized by anarchy whereas domestic politics is c...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Followers of law, politics and business commonly relate stories of individuals who appear to predict an expected performance level below what they believe themselves to be capable of. The standard explanation for such rhetoric is that it hedges against the negative consequences of unanticipated failures and takes advantage of unexpected successes....

Do legal institutions that limit governmental power promote order in democracies? Although the worldwide rule of law project predicates its reform efforts on knowing the answer to this question, we are aware of no systematic empirical test. Further mainstream literatures on democratic survival and civil conflict simply ignore the role of law in pro...

The application of rational choice theories to judicial politics in Latin America has yielded several important insights about the emergence of judicial independence and the success or failure of judges to limit governments. But existing theories also contain certain analytical blind spots: If judges are strategically deferential, why are courts in...

Although they are not directly accountable to voters, constitutional court judges communicate with the general public through the media. In Judicial Power and Strategic Communication in Mexico, Jeffrey K. Staton argues that constitutional courts develop public relations strategies in order to increase the transparency of judicial behavior and promo...

The rule of law has become a favored solution to crucial substantive problems in the social sciences. Measures of the concept have proliferated over the past decade, yet scholars commonly question their validity. We argue that measurement validity concerns are largely a result of disagreement over the concept being targeted. We suggest that the bro...

Democratic and autocratic states routinely violate their international agreements protecting human rights. Scholars typically link ratification and compliance behavior theoretically but test their models separately; however, if the behaviors are jointly determined then we should treat them that way empirically. We consider how domestic judiciaries...

The grip of Realism on the study of international politics has been considerably loosened over the past three decades, but one of the central assumptions of Realism remains unchallenged by scholars working within other approaches: the primary distinction between domestic and international politics lies in a sharp distinction between legal instituti...

An established line of research demonstrates that vague judicial opinions are less likely to be implemented than clear opinions. Vague opinions thus present a puzzle. Why would judges craft opinions that risk noncompliance? We argue that the relationships between judges and other policy makers in separation-of-powers systems are central to understa...

do not know why this is listed here - cannot get rid of it

Do legal institutions that limit governmental power promote order in democracies? The worldwide rule of law project is predicated on knowing the answer to this question; however, there is no systematic empirical test of the relationship between legal institutions that constrain arbitrary state power and democratic order. Indeed, the mainstream lite...

Democratic and autocratic states routinely violate their international agreements protecting human rights. Scholars typically study this phenomenon by focusing on ratification or compliance behavior separately. In our view, these behaviors are inherently linked, and our analysis should address the link explicitly. We consider how domestic judiciari...

Theorists of dual nationality in both law and the social sciences disagree intensely over whether an individual's nationality status affects his or her connection to the American political system. Recent empirical analyses find that naturalized citizens that possess dual nationality status are less connected to the American political system than na...

This study assesses the influence of dual nationality on connectedness to the American polity. Specifically, it examines whether first-generation dual national Latinos are less politically connected than their sole U.S. national counterparts. We define political connectedness as the skills, attitudes, and behaviors that attach someone to the politi...

An established line of research demonstrates that vague judicial opinions are less likely to be implemented than clear opinions. Vague opinions thus present a puzzle. Why would judges craft opinions that risk noncompliance? We argue that the relationships between judges and other policy makers in separation-of-powers systems are central to understa...

Do beliefs in the credibility of institutions designed to constrain the state from violating rights affect the behavior of all individuals equally? We argue that the effect depends on how insulated an individual is from rights violations. We test this argument against individual-level data on democratic regime support, confidence in legal instituti...

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the consequences of delegate selection rules for presidential nominations, yet few have sought an explanation for the variance in these rules across the states and over time. In this article, we ask why state party elites would open their processes of delegate selection to a large and potentially ideo...

A significant majority of the world's constitutional courts publicize their decisions through direct contact with the national media. This interest in public information is puzzling in so far as constitutional judges are not directly accountable to voters. I argue that the promotion of case results is consistent with a theory of judicial behavior i...

Despite the general preference for clarity in the law, judicial opinions frequently produce unclear standards. While vagueness may result from the natural imprecision of language, we contend that political considerations are at the heart of judicial decisions to issue ambiguous or precise decisions. In particular, ambiguity presents judges with the...

Recent theoretical arguments on judicial policy implementation posit a public enforcement mechanism for judicial decisions that challenge governmental authority. While this mechanism nicely links insights from both positive and normative theories of compliance, it raises two issues. First, there is a distinction between the degree of support consti...

Recent theory in judicial politics suggests that a normative public commitment to a state’s high court can undermine political constraints on judging induced by the separation-of-powers system. If public support affects judicial authority in this way, judges ought to care about influencing the information to which citizens have access, especially...

Abstract will be provided by author.