Research Projects

Monitoring High Court rulings in new democracies

High courts in new democracies possess constitutional review powers but lack direct enforcement mechanisms, raising the question of how they secure compliance with their rulings. We develop a strategic theory of judicial monitoring, positing that judges deploy oversight measures selectively when social pressure raises reputational stakes. Using a novel dataset of 6,093 decisions by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court (2015–2024) and Firth regressions, we test the effects of social pressure, budgetary resources, and case salience on the probability of monitoring. Results show that amicus briefs -our proxy for social pressure- increase the odds of formal monitoring by 3.6 times, raising predicted probabilities from 2% to 8%, while budget and salience exhibit no consistent impact. We argue that judges engage in institutional “triage,” relying on informational cues to balance resource costs against reputational risks. Our study contributes a large-N perspective on post-decision enforcement and highlights the pivotal role of civil-society participation in strengthening judicial compliance.

Strategical presidential vetoes in Multiparty Presidential Systems

This paper investigates how the content of legislation influences presidential veto behavior. While previous research emphasizes institutional or contextual factors, it often overlooks the substantive nature of bills. This study argues that economic legislation is more likely to be vetoed, as presidents are held accountable by voters for economic outcomes and use the veto to micromanage public investment, taxation, subsidies, spending, and debt. To test this hypothesis, I analyze 7,222 bills passed by the Ecuadorian and Peruvian congresses between 1995 and 2022, employing the XLM-RoBERTa multilingual Transformer model for topic classification. The results demonstrate that bills addressing economic issues significantly increase the likelihood of a presidential veto. Furthermore, consistent with distributive policymaking theories, presidents tend to employ amendatory vetoes—modifying legislative proposals—rather than total vetoes. These findings clearly underscore the critical importance of bill content in legislative bargaining and contribute to our understanding of executive-legislative relations in Latin American presidential systems.

Disentangling the value of the judicial office: Evidence from Ecuador

This paper provides the first systematic estimate of the economic returns to serving on an apex court in a newer democracy. Using data from Ecuador’s Constitutional Court (2001–2023) across five cohorts, I exploit the quasi-random appointment of shortlisted nominees to identify causal effects on post-tenure income. Drawing on a novel dataset combining rich biographical profiles with individual income tax records, and employing a staggered difference-in-differences design, I find that appointment increases annual income by an average of 61.2%, equivalent to USD 21,561.67, over a six-year period. Gains are consistently positive across different court compositions, ranging from USD 44,981.73 to USD 10,075.89. These results demonstrate that apex court service substantially enhances human and social capital, translating into lucrative post-office opportunities in private practice, academia, government, and international institutions. The findings have important implications for judicial selection design, incentive structures, and the political economy of courts in newer democracies.

Constitutional Reform in Ecuador

These papers track the evolution of proposed, passed, and failed constitutional reforms in Ecuador since 2020. Successive annual reports have been published in the International Review of Constitutional Reform, edited at the University of Texas at Austin.