Do voters punish noncompliance with high courts? A cross-national analysis

Abstract

Understanding how high courts successfully constrain the state poses a puzzle central to the study of constitutional review. An increasingly popular answer to this puzzle is that voters electorally punish governments for noncompliance with judicial decisions. This article conducts a cross-national analysis of the relationship between noncompliance and an incumbent government’s electoral success. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy Project on noncompliance with the national high courts of 74 countries from 2007 to 2017, I examine whether voters systematically punish or reward noncompliance. The analysis of a series of hierarchical linear models reveals that engaging in more noncompliance decreases an incumbent government’s vote share in contexts with a strong pre-existing norm of compliance. This result is robust to both the inclusion of potential confounding variables and alternative model specifications.