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

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. • As political corruption increases, ruling governments become more likely to verbally attack the judiciary. • In countries with independent media, higher levels of corruption correlate with higher government attacks on the judiciary. • In countries with non-independent media, political corruption does not lead to government attacks on the judiciary. • In countries with partially independent media, government attacks on judiciary increases as corruption increases.