Judicial Lobbying: The Politics of Labor Law Constitutional Interpretation

This paper links the theory of interest groups influence over the legislature with that of congressionalcontrol over the judiciary. The resulting framework reconciles the theoretical literature of lobbyingwith the negative available evidence on the impact of lobbying over legislative outcomes, and sheds light to the determinants of lobbying in separation-of-powers systems. We provide conditions for judicial decisions to be sensitive to legislative lobbying, and find that lobbying falls the more divided the legislature is on the relevant issues. We apply this framework to analyze supreme court labor decisions in Argentina, and find results consistent with the predictions of the theory. A lthough the influence of the Supreme Courton policymaking in undisputed, interest groupsdevote the bulk of their efforts to influence legislators. This asymmetry is largely due to a com-paratively easier access to elected politicians. Interest groups can readily enter the political process by in-fluencing legislators via campaign contributions, or by providing information with electoral saliency. These instruments are either directly absent or less effective with a nonelective body such as the court. In this paper, we focus on two intimately related questions arising as a result of this asymmetry. How do the interaction