Professor Rok Spruk (University of Ljubljana) will be the guest at the CEAPS seminar

The speaker will present the study entitled: „Political Economy of Judicial Backsliding and Reform: In Search of the Prometheus?". Professor Rok Spruk is not only a specialist in Political Economy and Institutional Economics, but also an expert in causal inference in empirical studies.

This meeting is part of the seminar series organized by the CEAPS Center. It is scheduled on March 12, 2025 at 17:00.

We encourage you to attend in person at the Faculty of Economic Sciences (room A409). If you are unable to attend in person, please contact Professor Katarzyna Metelska-Szaniawska by e-mail: zTS|{=/wy23g^Q~u!bUJi'd]#[fB5qa%}c[M#VDZtm.H6@rsQ (until March 10).

Additionally, you are also welcome to take advantage of the opportunity to meet with the guest individually or in small working groups on March 12-13. Such meetings can be an excellent opportunity to discuss your own research with Professor Rok Spruk, to gain valuable insights, including new research ideas, or to establish collaborations. Meetings will last 30-60 minutes. Please confirm your participation and preferred time by the end of this week by email to: zTS|{=/wy23g^Q~u!bUJi'd]#[fB5qa%}c[M#VDZtm.H6@rsQ.

Below, we present an abstract of the presentation.

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In the past two decades, government-orchestrated attacks on judiciary have become increasingly common both across mature jurisdictions as well as developing countries, leading to undermine judicial independence. Yet, the political context that either facilitates or hampers viral attacks on the judiciary remains poorly understood. One of the most common forms of attacks on the judiciary involves court curbing strategies to reduce the power of the Supreme Court and diminish the impact of its rule. Such attacks proliferated and gained significant foothold in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, Türkiye, Poland, United States and a rapidly increasing number of other countries. We investigate how government-orchestrated assaults on the judiciary, disguised as modernization efforts, undermine judicial independence. Our case studies focus on the constitutional overhauls initiated in Venezuela (in 2000) and Türkiye (in 2011) using cutting-edge hybrid difference-in-differences and synthetic control-based identification strategies. Our findings reveal that authoritarian interventions lead to an immediate and lasting breakdown of judicial independence. The deterioration in judicial independence in both Türkiye and Venezuela vis-á-vis the latent Mediterranean and Latin American counterfactual is robust to variations in the donor pool composition. It does not appear to be driven by pre-existing judicial changes and withstands numerous temporal and spatial placebo checks across over nine million randomly sequenced donor samples. Exploiting a series of the three waves of constitutional reforms in the United Kingdom between 2005 and 2010, we estimate the impact of gradual constitutional reforms on the trajectories of judicial integrity and independence. Based on the novel estimates of noise-free ideal points of judicial independence without coder biases generated across a random sequence of 9 billion chained samples for 23 common-law jurisdictions, we show that contrary to the episodes of democratic erosion in the continental Europe, constitutional reforms in the United Kingdom helped to advance judicial independence further. In the last step, we focus on the economic effects of judicial reforms. In particular, we investigate how timeliness in enforcing legal contracts affects economic growth across countries. We focus on judicial timeliness as a proxy for courts' performance in a large panel of 169 countries over the 2004-2019 period. We show that, by raising uncertainty and promoting opportunistic behavior in business transactions, slower courts hinder economic growth. The relationship is robust to diverse model specifications and appears stronger for business environments more heavily relying on judiciaries such as economies undergoing rapid growth, countries characterized by low human capital levels and civil law jurisdictions.