Judicial Policy Implementation in Mexico City and Merida

Abstract

Why do some of the world's constitutional courts challenge governmental authority over many kinds of policies, while others avoid conflict over particularly sensitive or salient political issues? Why do some elected officials immediately obey judicial resolutions that challenge their authority, while others find ways not to implement judicial decisions? These questions are important in understanding the role constitutional courts play in ensuring that elected officials respect a state's fundamental political rules.1 If constitutional courts are unwilling to challenge governmental authority, or if public officials are unwilling to implement politically unfavorable decisions, the degree to which constitutional courts can serve as effective horizontal mechanisms of accountability will be considerably constrained. Despite the importance of both questions, much of the growing comparative scholarship on law and courts has sought to explain judicial behavior without addressing the reactions of government officials to adverse judicial decisions.2 Consequently, scholars are left with a largely one-sided account of judicial politics that provides much empirical support for theories of judicial decision making but little support for theoretical conclusions about the implementation of judicial policy. In contrast to this trend, recent work by Georg Vanberg integrates diverse studies of judicial activism and policy implementation by specifying what might be called a public enforcement mechanism for judicial orders, in which public support for courts and the related pressure constituents can place on their representatives may induce compliance with adverse judicial resolutions.3 On this account, public support also can provide the political cover courts require to take on sensitive political conflicts. Of course, this mechanism works only if people are sufficiently informed about the nature of the conflicts they are purported to enforce. Accordingly, Vanberg considers how the relative transparency ofjudicialized conflicts influences interbranch conflict.4 Despite Vanberg's important theoretical advance in simplifying diverse yet connected studies, his model leaves a number of issues underdeveloped. This article addresses two. First, public willingness to help enforce judicial resolutions and public capacity to impose significant costs on their representatives for instances of noncompliance are distinct concepts. They should be treated as such in both theoretical and empirical analysis. Second, if the kind of information concerning interbranch conflict to which people have