Judges without robes and judicial voting in contexts of institutional instability: the case of Ecuador´s constitutional court, 1999-2007

Abstract

This article develops and utilises an ideal point index of judges to explain why they may cast conviction-based votes in contexts of institutional instability. In it, I modify the classic argument that an increase in institutional instability causes a commensurate increase in the likelihood of strategic voting. By instead proposing a curvilinear relationship between these two variables, the article proposes that, irrespective of the term length of the judges, an increase in institutional instability increases the probability of strategic voting only to a given point, after which, paradoxically, a greater degree of job uncertainty tends to favour conviction voting. This scenario provides incentives for the emergence of ‘judges without robes’: attorneys who accept appointments as judges for a limited time, and who use the judicial arena to improve their personal prestige and portfolio of clients who will return to them for future consultation.