Abstract

After the end of colonial periods, many Latin American countries struggled with authoritarian regimes. Most of these countries experienced waves of authoritarianism followed by democratic moments during the last century. For that reason, democratic institutions were built under the imminent threat of a coup d’état. To ensure that presidents would not be persecuted for political reasons, Brazil has established that its Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal) would be the only court with powers to judge presidents (except impeachment cases), federal deputies, and senators, amongst other higher authorities. Based on the Brazilian example, this work seeks to understand if other Latin American countries also offer the same protection to their authorities and why. What are the factors that influence the existence of jurisdictional privilege? Furthermore, what does influence the extent of the privilege given to more or fewer authorities? This research used a multi-method approach to present and analyze the institutional phenomenon of jurisdictional privilege. First of all, exploratory and descriptive comparative research was carried out from Latin American constitutional texts to identify where jurisdictional privileges are present and their respective amounts. Then, a quantitative analysis applied statistical tests to the variables included in the research database, to check possible correlations between institutional quality indexes and the variation in the number of representative categories of political authorities benefiting from the privilege of jurisdiction. Finally, this work performed a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to describe the logical relationship between the variables in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of the phenomenon under study. Keywords: Latin America; institutional comparative analysis; Supreme Courts; jurisdictional privilege; empirical approach.

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