RETHINKING JUDICIAL INSTABILITY IN DEVELOPING DEMOCRACIES: A NATIONAL AND SUBNATIONAL ANALYSIS OF SUPREME COURTS IN ARGENTINA

Why do justices remain in office such a short time despite having life tenure? The objective of this doctoral dissertation is to answer this question by systematically examining which factors influence judges' stability in office at the levels of both the Argentine National Supreme Court of Justice and the Provincial Supreme Courts, from 1983 to 2009. The main argument is that, in developing democracies like Argentina, the larger the ideological distance between the appointing executive and the current executive, the higher the probability that a sitting justice appointed by an executive with different preferences will leave office. With Supreme Court tenure that averages 4.6 years and a recent re-democratization process that started in 1983, Argentina provides a good opportunity to analyze the factors that influence frequent turnover in nascent democratic countries. The main findings of the research reveal that executives do not trust justices appointed by other executives with different political preferences and in fact there is an overlapping between the electoral executive cycles and judicial turnover. The evidence in the previous chapters have systematically expose that executives (specially at the beginning of their terms) do not buy the strategic behavior model that claims that the justices in the court appointed by executives with other preferences would rule in favor of the incoming executive so as to survive in office. In the end, what this finding reveals is that in general argentine presidents and governors have been very averse to risky outcomes when it came to the Supreme Courts. Executive had been more conservative, or reluctant to risk, than what the literature had predicted. It is precisely because executives believe in a more attitudinal behavior of the justices that the political proximity between incoming executives and the justice matters to account for judicial stability in the bench. The results in Chapter 5 from the provincial level analysis had disclosed with great detail that loyalty between executives and justices are highly personalized and thus, strongly controlled