Collaborative Research: Democratic Accountability and Judicial Legitimacy

This project tracks citizens’ attitudes toward a judicial reform effort and the judiciary as these reforms are implemented, as citizens elect their judges, and as the directly elected judges are seated. The reforms call for the direct election of more than 7,000 of the most important judicial positions in the country. Because judicial independence is associated with salutary governmental and economic outcomes, and public support for judicial institutions is a key determinant of judicial independence and influence, this project has implications for understanding how the direct election of judges might bolster or undermine institutional separation of powers, economic development, and broader international relations.

Most of the accumulated knowledge about the public's support for the judiciary has relied upon surveys asking citizens for their evaluations of hypothetical proposals to reform the country's high Court. The reforms that prompt this study provide an opportunity to test theories about the correlates and consequences of public support for courts in an environment where the stakes are real and cross-national comparisons are feasible.

Tracking public opinion over a four-wave panel survey and analyzing unique survey experiments, this research will address three debates. First, each wave of the survey will reach respondents at a point in the reform implementation that enables researchers to disentangle longstanding theories regarding the determinants of public support for judicial institutions.

Second, relying on within-respondent, cross-wave comparisons, the PIs will evaluate the extent to which the electoral connection affects citizens’ legal attitudes about courts and judicial authorities, and their willingness to engage them as a result. Third, the PIs will assess how the reform---and citizens' responses to it---affect their willingness to obey decisions they do not agree with and to tolerate noncompliance with constitutional authorities' decisions.

These outcomes have direct relations to the country's ability to attract international investment and to ensure that the separation of powers balances power across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.