Matthew C. Ingram

Subfields: Comparative Politics, International Relations
Dissertation: “Crafting Courts in New Democracies: The Politics of Subnational Judicial Performance in Brazil and Mexico.”
Dissertation Committee: William Stanley (chair), Wendy L. Hansen, Kenneth Roberts (Cornell), Ben Goldfrank (Seton Hall), and Jeffrey Staton (Emory)

My dissertation examines state courts in Latin America's two largest democracies, Brazil and Mexico. Recognizing the vital role of strong courts and the rule of law for both the quality of democracy and smooth functioning of markets, the dissertation seeks to explain the uneven strength and performance of subnational judiciaries. The project is based on 20 months of field research, which I completed on May 28 of this year, funded primarily by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. Building on existing research regarding the political origins of institutional choice and performance, I sequence quantitative and qualitative methods. First, I conducted a time-series cross-section analysis with court budgets as a proxy for judicial strength as a dependent variable. I developed separate models for both countries covering 1993 to 2007. These analyses identify the positive effect of competitive elections and of new, left-of-center administrations on the strength of post-authoritarian judicial institutions in both countries. Subsequently, I used quantitative tools for case selection to identify typical, well-predicted states. I then built a "most similar" qualitative research design around these observations, nesting three case studies in each country within the econometric analysis. These cases provide the basis for a qualitative analysis that offers a more textured complement to the statistical analysis, extending the theoretical framework to other measures of judicial strength, including institutional design, career structure, and an examination of court performance across different types of litigation.

The case studies draw on archival research and more than 100 personal interviews with judges and other legal elites. This component of the dissertation supports the conclusion that competition, especially from the left, enhances the resource strength, design, administrative capacity, and performance of judicial institutions. Beyond supporting the quantitative results, however, the case studies contribute new theoretical insights and clarify mechanisms and motivations shaping the judiciary in new democracies. Specifically, I find that judges themselves play an important role in determining the extent of judicial reform and the resulting strength of the judicial system. In some cases, judges' advocacy reinforces leadership provided by elected officials; in other cases, judges' lobbying changes the preferences and goals of elected officials, producing reforms in states where other factors such as competition and the a priori ideology of elected officials would not have been favorable to reform.