Judicialization of Politics by Elected Politicians

Abstract

Political Research Q u a rte rly 2014, Vol. 67(3) 4 89-503 © 2 0 1 4 U nive rsity o f Utah Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav A b s tra ctThis study argues that the proxim ity to a general election would affect the frequency of the opposition parties' referrals to the constitutional court. This effect is hypothesized to be conditioned on the opposition parties' prediction o f the upcoming election results. To test this theory, I constructed an original data set including all acts promulgated by Turkish Parliament and all cases that were brought to the constitutional court by the opposition parties during 1984-2011. The results show that once the opposition party believes that it will lose the election, it increases its referrals to the court as election approaches.

Is One Health a Viable Strategy in Animal Health Litigation: Evidence from Civil Lawsuits in China

“…For the continuous variable Winratio, we employed the OLS model (we lost 180 observations where the plaintiffs lost or received no damage awards), represented as follows: (3) where Winratio denotes the win ratio of the case, γ is the constant, δ and θ are the regression coefficients, and σ is the stochastic term. Tables 3-5 present descriptive statistics for the total number of civil judgments of the five focal zoonosis categories (i.e., rabies, avian influenza, brucellosis, aftosa, and bilharziasis), interested variables, and control variables used in this study.…”

“…These lawsuits are always time-consuming, costly, and exhausting. Instinct tells us that launching such kind of lawsuits is worthwhile for we see can strategic litigations here and there in the courtroom to create broader and proper changes in society [2][3][4][5][6] and animal welfare advocates need to disseminate their willingness thus inspire more people to protect animals [7][8][9]. However, there might be other messages sent to the public by these animal protection lawsuits: animal abuse exists, and this infringement is so serious that judicial action is required.…”

Can Courts in Nondemocracies Deter Election Fraud? De Jure Judicial Independence, Political Competition, and Election Integrity

“…Opposition groups may take cases to court to raise publicity around an issue (Dotan and Hofnung 2005; McCann 1994), to protest against the authorities (Dor and Hofnung 2006), or to push the incumbent to make concessions between elections (Chernykh 2014). Such strategic litigation can be especially useful for imposing a cost on the regime when the policy domain is an issue—like election fraud, or corruption—that the government cannot defend on the merits (Aydın-Çakır 2014). For individual candidates, casting doubt on an election result in court can be a way of retaining political credibility for future races (Kerr and Wahman 2021).…”

“…It argues that nondemocratic governments establish de jure independent courts in order to capture a variety of benefits, many of which have little to do with electoral competition directly. These reforms increase the likelihood of legal mobilization among opposition groups and parties, bringing more cases to the courts that allege pro-government electoral malfeasance (Aydın-Çakır 2014; Dotan and Hofnung 2005; McCann 1994). As a result, even if the rate at which courts rule against the government remains constant, the absolute number of unfavorable rulings for the government is liable to increase.…”