Anti-vote-buying campaigns led by NGOs and political elites denounce the practice as a crass economic transaction detrimental to democracy. Do potential clients stigmatize vote buying to the same degree, or does the mass public have a more conditional view of the acceptability of vote buying? We theorize that normative evaluations of vote buying vary based on individuals' understanding of the transaction itself and abstract societal costs associated with the practice. We assess this perspective using survey experiments conducted in several Latin American countries that present hypothetical vote-buying situations for evaluation by respondents, varying the socioeconomic status of the hypothetical client and the client's political predispositions. We find that the disapproval of vote buying is highly conditional on the attributes of the hypothetical client and that evaluations of vote buying depend on conceptions of the concrete benefits and abstract costs of vote buying as a part of electoral politics.
Why do courts rely on specific bodies of jurisprudence to justify decisions? We analyze judicial dialogue in the Inter-American System, where the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has defined its mission as the construction of a regional legal order. This order needs courts at all levels to engage with each other. Original databases of citations by the IACtHR to the judgments of national courts, and in the opposite direction, allow us to establish whether such practices are emerging. Furthermore, the article asks why the IACtHR cites some courts but not others, and to what end. Statistical models reveal that the IACtHR is more likely to cite case law from countries that exhibit characteristics that are more conducive to the creation of a regional human rights legal order, and jurisprudence from countries with which it has had more extensive experience and interaction. Qualitative content analysis suggests that the IACtHR uses citations as a source of persuasive authority, but also to showcase domestic acceptance of its doctrines and decisions. This leads us to characterize citations as an effort to educate courts in the use of Inter-American jurisprudence and thus foster greater integration. At the national level, we find considerable temporal/cross-country variation in openness to the dialogue. We rely on original quantitative indicators and case studies to show this is as a function of the IACtHR’s growing visibility and networking efforts, as well as country-level changes in legal cultures and judicial personnel that push courts away from formalism.
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