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To what extent do courts in Latin America protect individual rights and limit governments? This volume answers these fundamental questions by bringing together today's leading scholars of judicial politics. Drawing on examples from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica and Bolivia, the authors demonstrate that there is widespread variation in the performance of Latin America's constitutional courts. In accounting for this variation, the contributors push forward ongoing debates about what motivates judges; whether institutions, partisan politics and public support shape inter-branch relations; and the importance of judicial attitudes and legal culture. The authors deploy a range of methods, including qualitative case studies, paired country comparisons, statistical analysis and game theory.
Uses a single-country case study to enrich research on the role of constitutional courts in new democracies.
Constitutions are no longer exclusively national projects, but increasingly result from broader transnational processes that form a transnational legal order.
This book assembles a selection of essays on Discourse and Intercultural Relations presented at Murcia University in September 2004. After the recent outburst of the East-West conflict intercultural relations and the challenges embedded in intercultural communication are of increasing importance. This compilation unravels these topics from the point of view of Discourse Analysis and Cultural Studies. The main aim is to highlight the discursive strategies employed by the dominant political elite in a variety of contexts to maintain and reinforce their power position in intercultural encounters. The paramount concern is, therefore, to reflect upon the interrelations between language, power and...
Lava Jato, a transnational bribery case that started in Brazil and spread throughout Latin America, upended elections and collapsed governments. Why did the investigation gain momentum in some countries but not others? The book traces reforms that enhanced prosecutors' capacity to combat white-collar crime and shows that Lava Jato became a full-blown anti-corruption crusade where reforms were coupled with the creation of aggressive taskforces. For some, prosecutors' unconventional methods were necessary and justified. Others saw dangerous affronts to due process and democracy. Given these controversies, how did voters react to a once-in-a-generation attempt to clean politics? Can prosecutors trigger hope, conveying a message of possible regeneration? Or does aggressive prosecution erode the tacit consensus around the merits of anti-corruption? Prosecutors, Voters and The Criminalization of Corruption in Latin America is a study of the impact of accountability through criminalization, one that dissects the drivers and dilemmas of resolute transparency efforts.
This book presents a searching critique of excessive reliance on courts as 'democracy-builders' in states emerging from authoritarian rule.
This title examines the political role of courts in new democracies in Latin America and Africa, focusing on their ability to hold political power-holders accountable when they act outside their constitutionally defined powers. The book also issues a warning: there are problems inherent in the current global move towards strong constitutional government, where increasingly strong powers are placed in the hands of judges who themselves are not made accountable.
The fatal embrace of human rights and neoliberalism Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “civilisation”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects.
Legislatures, the judiciary and civil society are important actors in representative democracies. In what ways and how well do they represent? And how effectively do they carry out their institutional and social roles? Both questions refer to the key dimensions of democracy analyzed in this book: representativeness and effectiveness, respectively. While they have been developed separately in scholarly work on institutions and regimes, there is little work considering them simultaneously, and on their interaction. Using quantitative and/or qualitative methods, contributions from top scholars in the field of legislatures, the judiciary and civil society examine these two concepts and their rel...
This book provides a comprehensive picture of the human rights diplomacy of the sub-Saharan African states, Asian states, Muslim states, the European Union, and the Latin American and Caribbean states. The book is based on the assumption that the religious and cultural norms of all important civilizations/cultures/religions can be reconciled, within certain limits, with the international human rights standards. The book explodes the myth that the UN Human Rights Council has become a platform for a “clash of civilizations”.