Replication Data for: Insecure Institutions: A Survivalist Theory of Judicial Manipulation in Latin America

Most theories of judicial politics are built around explaining the puzzle of judicial independence. This paper instead theorizes explicitly about the conditions under which politicians are prone to manipulate their courts. By positing that courts can partly endogenously shape leaders’ fate at the hands of legislative opponents, we argue that greater political insecurity leads presidents to gut judicial independence, not shore it up. Drawing on a novel dataset of judicial crises across eighteen Latin American countries following the third wave of democratization, we show that variation in judicial crises is systematically correlated with the president’s risk of non-electoral instability as captured by the history of past presidential crises, presidential power, and anti-governmental protests. To identify whether the effects of protest on judicial manipulation are causal, we use an instrumental variable approach based on international commodity prices weighted for each country. By treating institutional crises as inter-connected strategic decisions, this paper cuts against the tendency in the literature to treat these phenomena along parallel tracks; with one literature on presidential crises and another on judicial politics. Rather, constitutional hardball -- in all of its manifestations -- should be studied under a unified theoretical framework.​