Matthew C. Ingram

University at Albany, State University of New York | UAlbany · Department of Political Science

The role of Latin American courts in facilitating democracy and economic liberalization is considerable. But while national 'high courts' have been closely studied, the form, function, and empowerment of local courts are still not well understood. In Crafting Courts in New Democracies, Matthew C. Ingram fills this gap by examining the varying stren...

Existing research shows that the ideas of judges matter for judicial behavior both on the bench (decision making) and off the bench (lobbying and mobilization for institutional change). Yet there is little empirical evidence regarding the content and distribution of these ideas and even less evidence and fewer theoretical propositions regarding the...

Examining homicide across Brazil’s 5562 municipalities, we find that violence nearby has a positive effect on local violence (diffusion effect), violence exerts an unusual negative spatial effect in small clusters of communities in northeastern Brazil, and a prominent poverty reduction program (Bolsa Familia, BF) has mixed effects. The spatial dime...

Why have some Mexican states proceeded faster than others in the revolutionary transformation of overhauling criminal procedure? Contributing an original index of criminal procedure reform across Mexico's 32 states from 2002 to 2011 and building on existing research on policy diffusion, this article seeks to answer this question. It finds that the...

Mixed-methods designs have become increasingly popular. Lieberman (2005), for instance, advocates " nested analysis " , where cases for small-N analysis (SNA) are selected based on a large-N analysis (LNA). Yet, since the LNA in this approach assumes that units are independently distributed, such designs are unable to account for spatial dependence...

Violence has harmful effects on individuals and society. This is especially true in Latin America, a region that stands out globally for its high homicide rate. Building on research on subnational politics, democratization, and an inter-disciplinary literature that seeks to understand sources of violence, we examine the effect of municipal politics...

En este libro el lector encontrará una discusión sobre el gobierno de los jueces. Desde la política judicial –subdisciplina de la ciencia política que estudia la relación entre jueces y política– se muestra la importancia del poder judicial en las democracias actuales: cómo y por qué los jueces han emergido como un contrapeso efectivo, qué condicio...

Violence has harmful effects on individuals and society. This is especially true in Latin America, a region that stands out globally for its high homicide rate. Building on research on subnational politics, democratization, and an inter-disciplinary literature that seeks to understand sources of violence, we examine the effect of municipal politics...

Mixed-methods designs, especially those in which case selection is regression-based, have become popular across the social sciences. In this paper, we highlight why tools from spatial analysis—which have largely been overlooked in the mixed-methods literature—can be used for case selection and be particularly fruitful for theory development. We dis...

Under what conditions can courts be effective and the rule of law be meaningful in developing countries? A vast literature has emerged over the past several decades seeking to understand the factors that support or impede healthy judicial functioning in developing countries, as well as those that account for its stagnation and erosion. Scholars ana...

Beyond High Courts: The Justice Complex in Latin America is a much-needed volume that will make a significant contribution to the growing fields of comparative law and politics and Latin American legal institutions. The book moves these research agendas beyond the study of high courts by offering theoretically and conceptually rich empirical analys...

Criminal procedure in Mexico has experienced a massive and revolutionary transformation since the early 2000s, first at the subnational level (states) and more recently –only since 2014 – at the federal level. Given the initial emphasis on subnational reform, much scholarly attention focused on these local changes in state courts, and neglected the...

What are Mexico’s justice system weaknesses and how has the ongoing reform process affected its performance?

Incorporating Space in Multimethod Research: Combining Spatial Analysis with Case-Study Research - Volume 50 Issue 4 - Imke Harbers, Matthew C. Ingram

A key intermediary between courts and the public are the journalists who monitor the actions of justices and report their decisions, pronouncements, and proclivities. Justices and Journalists: The Global Perspective is the first volume of its kind - a comparative analysis of the relationship between supreme courts and the press who cover them. Unde...

The Ebola virus in West Africa has infected almost 30,000 and killed over 11,000 people. Recent models of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) have often made assumptions about how the disease spreads, such as uniform transmissibility and homogeneous mixing within a population. In this paper, we test whether these assumptions are necessarily correct, and offe...

The Ebola virus in West Africa has infected almost 30,000 and killed over 11,000 people. Recent models of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) have often made assumptions about how the disease spreads, such as uniform transmissibility and homogeneous mixing within a population. In this paper, we test whether these assumptions are necessarily correct, and offe...

Why have some Mexican states proceeded faster than others in the revolutionary transformation of overhauling criminal procedure? Contributing an original index of criminal procedure reform across Mexico's 32 states from 2002 to 2011 and building on existing research on policy diffusion, this article seeks to answer this question. It finds that the...

Over the past two decades, a rich research program has emerged in which scholars draw on the subnational approach to better understand phenomena such as state formation, democratization, and development. Despite its undisputed potential, however, the subnational approach also creates specific challenges for researchers throughout the research cycle...

Objectives: Examine the spatial distribution of five types of homicide across Brazil’s 5,562 municipalities and test the effects of family disruption, marginalization, poverty-reduction programs, environmental degradation, and the geographic diffusion of violence. Methods: Cluster analysis and spatial error, spatial lag, and geographically-weighte...

Political scientists working in the field of public law tend to organize phenomena into four main analytic categories: (1) institution building or empowerment; (2) activation of these institutions, once empowered; (3) decision making within these institutions; and (4) the broader social impact or effect of these decisions. The related analytic conc...

How does a court’s policy-making authority shape the nature of judicial behavior? We argue that judicial systems that limit policy-making authority also discourage the politicization of courts, encouraging judges to think narrowly about the interests of litigating parties. In contrast, granting a court high policy-making authority—affecting potenti...

Daniel M.Sabet, Police Reform in Mexico: Informal Politics and the Challenge of Institutional Change (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. xvi+278, £35.95; €45.00, hb. - Volume 46 Issue 1 - MATTHEW C. INGRAM

The persistence of subnational undemocratic regimes in new democracies has recently revived interest in intra-national patterns of democratization. This article offers new data and a methodological contribution to this literature, emphasizing the measurement of institutional variation across territorial units and levels of government. Developing ne...

This study offers the first time series cross-section analysis of state courts in Mexico, explaining variation in judicial spending across Mexico’s 31 states from 1993 to 2009. Cutting against mainstream accounts of judicial empowerment that highlight electoral competition, I conclude that increasing competition, while a necessary precondition for...

Existing explanations of judicial reform emphasize the positive effects of electoral competition. However, multiple, competing, and even contradictory mechanisms behind this association obfuscate causation, and variation in the timing and content of reforms remains puzzling for these accounts. Leveraging a “most similar” comparative design at the s...

Speaking at the London School of Economics and Political Science in March 2011, Mexico’s national security spokesman, Alejandro Poiré, identified weak institutional capacity in the judicial sector as the crux of the security crisis that has plagued Mexico since the mid- 1990s. To be sure, the root causes of Mexico’s recent crime and violence are mu...

Existing research in Mexico suggests the electoral decline of the previously hegemonic PRI and the increasing presence in state government of historically opposition parties, PAN and PRD, but especially the left-of-center PRD, translate into stronger local courts. Building on these findings, this paper traces the process of judicial change in three...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Nepal Study Center, University of New Mexico

Judicial efficiency can be engineered. Although there are several significant determinants of judicial efficiency that are, relatively speaking, out of the control of policy makers and politicians, this research argues that institutional design is a critical variable over which there is substantial control. In this quantitative study of the judicia...