(Re)examining the insurance model of judicial independence across democracies

Despite being a dominant explanation of judicial independence in democracies for over a decade, the "insurance model" has received little systematic attention. I argue that how we conceptualize democracy is especially important for analyses of judicial independence employing this insurance framework, demanding more careful attention from scholars. I illustrate that how empirical results are contingent on specific conceptualizations by replicating the single existing study examining the insurance model across democracies globally. In doing so I demonstrate that existing findings are largely driven by classifying electoral authoritarian regimes like Kazakhstan and Russia as democracies.