A Theory of Defiant Courts in Nondemocratic Regimes
研究了为何一些非民主政权中仍存在偶尔反抗政府的法院，提出法院反抗能为政府提供精英分裂的信息，从而帮助政府平衡选民与精英利益。
Regimes that exhibit authoritarian features while still retaining some traditional democratic institutions are on the rise. Even though such regimes have eliminated important constraints on executive power, some still feature an occasionally defiant judiciary. We provide a novel explanation for this phenomenon by focusing on the judiciary’s role as a potential source of valuable information to the government about divisions among the regime’s elites. Under certain conditions, a defiant judiciary is observed in equilibrium only if the resulting revelation about the strength of the elites would be sufficiently informative for the government to warrant reneging on its ex ante optimal policy. Intuitively, in the absence of a strong legislative opposition or a free media, occasional judicial defiance helps the government by more informatively balancing the interests of the voters and the elites. Our results contribute to the debates about the survival of defiant institutions in authoritarian regimes.