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13 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 397 (2010-2011)
Public Support and Judicial Crises in Latin America

handle is hein.journals/upjcl13 and id is 401 raw text is: PUBLIC SUPPORT AND JUDICIAL CRISES IN LATIN AMERICA Gretchen Helmke* If preceding history shows anything, it is that when judicial decisions wanderfar from what the public will tolerate, bad things happen to the Court and the justices. How do courts establish their power? What conditions undermine it? These are the core questions taken up in Barry Friedman's recent book, The Will of the People. As his title and the quote above suggest, the answer hinges on how aligned judges are with public opinion. Drawing on the history of the United States Supreme Court, Fried- man argues that judicial power waxes when judges are able to discern and willing to match the larger trends in the public mood, and wanes otherwise. To the extent that courts are able to build a supportive constituency, they will be able to deflect potential challenges to their power. Here, I begin to explore how well Friedman's thesis travels to a part of the world where courts are widely considered to be weak and unstable: contemporary Latin America. Although we lack readily available data on how specific judicial decisions map onto public opi- nion, the Latinobar6metro gives us some sense of how public support 2 for courts in the region has varied over time and across countries. Paired with a unique, cross-sectional, time series data set on political attacks against high courts in the region, which I constructed, I find that low public support for the judiciary is correlated with political at- tacks against judges. Indeed, low levels of legitimacy appear to have more explanatory power than several other intuitively plausible caus- es of judicial instability. I then address more general questions of * Paper prepared for the University of Pennsylvaniajournal of Constitutional Law 2010 Sympo- sium: The Judiciary and the Popular Will (Jan. 29-30, 2010). I am extremely grateful to Shawn Ling Ramirez for outstanding research assistance, to Julio Rios-Figueroa for gen- erously sharing his data, and to Jeffrey Staton for our many conversations on the themes in this paper. 1 BARRY FRIEDMAN, THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE: How PUBLic OPINION HAS INFLUENCED THE SUPREME COURT AND SHAPED THE MEANING OF THE CONSTITUTION 375 (2009). 2 Latinobar6metro is a public opinion survey conducted annually for several Latin American countries by the Latinobar6metro Corporation, based in Santiago, Chile. The data and analysis cited in this section can be found in Gretchen Helmke & Julio Rios-Figueroa, In- troduction to COURTS IN LATIN AMERICA (Gretchen Helmke & Julio Rios-Figueroa eds.) (forthcoming 2010). 397

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