INSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATIONS OF COURT POWER: APPOINTMENTS, IDEOLOGY, AND ACTORS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE.

What accounts for activism on high courts? Under traditional democratic theory, courts are supposed to act as an important check on governmental excesses or abuses. Yet, most theory regarding the development of court systems recommends that young courts refrain from challenging the decisions of government. In this paper, I explore the avenues through which constitutional courts assert judicial power within developing democracies. Using a unique database of abstract review decisions from the Polish, Latvian, and Slovenian constitutional courts, I find evidence that institutional incentives contribute in several ways to instances of court activism. Specifically, I find that judicial panels are much more likely to overturn laws when there is an ideological divergence between the court and the law under review. At the same time, the propensity of courts to overturn laws is also greater when government monitoring and oversight agencies refer laws to these courts. Both findings have potentially important implications for the ways in which courts operate, particularly in developing democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]