Informal Institutions and de facto Judicial Independence: The Missing Link towards Formal Efficacy
Keywords:
informal institutions, judicial independence, social norms, institutional efficacy, Latin AmericaAbstract
Building on the literature on formal and informal institutions, this paper offers a typology of the role informal institutions play in the efficacy or inefficacy of formal institutions. Particularly, whether and why de jure and de facto independence converge or diverge. We distinguish four roles that informal institutions can play: competing, reinforcing, overlapping, and redundant. To illustrate our typology, we include examples of each role from Latin American countries. In Brazil we show that a norm of professionalism reinforces internal judicial independence, whereas in Mexico a norm of patronage competes with it. In Uruguay we show that a norm of legislative cooperation is redundant with a high level of de jure external judicial independence, whereas in Paraguay a norm of militant subordination overlaps with a low level of it.
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