Courts that matter: Judges, litigants and the politics of rights enforcement in Latin America

In recent decades, citizens in young and established democracies alike have increasingly turned to courts seeking to solve political disputes and to enforce rights. In Latin America, the transformation of courts into key scenarios for the discussion of public policy, the protection of rights, and the struggle for political change has been one of the most significant political trends following the third wave of democratization. Scholarly research has focused largely on exploring the determinants of judicial assertiveness, inter-branch conflict, and the turn to legal mobilization for political means. Less attention has been given to the on-the-ground consequences of growing judicial intervention. Under what conditions can courts in developing democracies produce political and social change? More specifically, why do some rulings have greater impact than others? These questions are crucial to understanding the process whereby courts can become effective enforcers of rights, a central aspect of democratization.;This dissertation examines the actual results of new court-ordered policies and the novel oversight mechanisms that some high courts have recently deployed to monitor compliance with some of their most important rulings. I argue that judicial impact in cases that deeply affect public policy in a particular area depends on the ways in which organized constituencies in civil society interact with innovative court-promoted oversight mechanisms such as follow-up committees, public hearings, and information requests. I develop my argument through comparative case studies of eight selected landmark rulings on socioeconomic rights handed down by the highest courts in Colombia and Argentina. Greater impact hinges on the presence of a dense legal constituency that engages with the institutional spaces that the court creates---spaces in which multiple actors converge in a larger and lengthy process.;The dissertation first introduces a framework to conceptualize and measure judicial impact, as a necessary building block to develop a theory of how court-promoted monitoring and organized legal constituencies in civil society influence impact. The empirical chapters present in-depth case studies of eight highly important rulings nested in paired comparisons depending on whether both oversight and a dense legal constituency are present, only one of them is, or neither.