Challenging decisions: High courts and economic governance in Argentina and Brazil

High courts in polities around the world have become more assertive---and have begun to exhibit greater authority---since the mid-20th century. In many countries in Latin America, a "dual transition" occurring since regime change in the 1980s---simultaneous economic and legal transformation---has placed courts at the center of the political stage. While scholars of comparative judicial politics have begun to examine the conditions under which courts challenge the exercise of government power, the issue of compliance with judicial rulings has been under-analyzed, and little work examines patterns in courts' willingness and ability to constrain government power in politically-crucial cases.;This study addresses these issues through an examination of the judicialization of economic governance in Argentina and Brazil during the first decades of the post-authoritarian period. Part I describes the simultaneous economic and legal transitions in each country, and outlines the two-pronged approach that executives adopted to deal with judicial contestation of their economic policies: high court shaping (politicization in Argentina and professionalization in Brazil), and judicial centralization. Part II of the study investigates the general logic behind high courts' selective assertiveness when ruling on politically-crucial cases, drawing on analysis of a large-N sample of such cases to propose the thesis of tactical balancing. That thesis holds that high courts weigh a discrete set of considerations when ruling on politically crucial cases; the relative salience of those considerations to each case leads Courts to challenge or endorse the exercise of government power. Qualitative analysis of an intermediate-N set of cases involving national economic policy, as well as several case studies, illustrate the thesis.;Part III of the study shifts the focus to patterns of high court-elected branch interaction in the economic realm. The study illustrates that the prevailing pattern of inter-branch interaction over economic policy in Argentina was Court submission, punctuated by moments of inter-branch confrontation. In Brazil, by contrast, a consistent pattern of compromise marked those relations. The study offers an institutional account of this variation, suggesting that these contrasting patterns of inter-branch interaction have their roots in the different self-reinforcing high court cycles induced in each country by the distinctive strategies of high court shaping executives employed since the mid-20th century.