Assaults on Judicial Independence under the Pretense of Modernization: Evidence from Venezuela
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866912707511320576 |
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| author | Garoupa, Nuno Rosales, Virginia Spruk, Rok |
| author_facet | Garoupa, Nuno Rosales, Virginia Spruk, Rok |
| contents | We investigate how government-orchestrated assaults on the judiciary, disguised as modernization efforts, undermine judicial independence. Our study focuses on Venezuela's constitutional overhaul in the early 2000s, initiated by Hugo Chávez and implemented through a judicial emergency committee. We employ a hybrid synthetic control and difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of populist attacks on judicial independence trajectories. By comparing Venezuela to a stable pool of countries without radical constitutional changes, our identification strategy isolates the effect of populist assaults from unobservable confounders and common time trends. Our findings reveal that authoritarian interventions lead to an immediate and lasting breakdown of judicial independence. The deterioration in judicial independence vis-á-vis the estimated counterfactual is robust to variations in the donor pool composition. It does not appear to be driven by pre-existing judicial changes and withstands numerous temporal and spatial placebo checks across over nine million randomly sequenced donor samples. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_10681 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Assaults on Judicial Independence under the Pretense of Modernization: Evidence from Venezuela Garoupa, Nuno Rosales, Virginia Spruk, Rok General Economics Economics Econometrics Applications We investigate how government-orchestrated assaults on the judiciary, disguised as modernization efforts, undermine judicial independence. Our study focuses on Venezuela's constitutional overhaul in the early 2000s, initiated by Hugo Chávez and implemented through a judicial emergency committee. We employ a hybrid synthetic control and difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of populist attacks on judicial independence trajectories. By comparing Venezuela to a stable pool of countries without radical constitutional changes, our identification strategy isolates the effect of populist assaults from unobservable confounders and common time trends. Our findings reveal that authoritarian interventions lead to an immediate and lasting breakdown of judicial independence. The deterioration in judicial independence vis-á-vis the estimated counterfactual is robust to variations in the donor pool composition. It does not appear to be driven by pre-existing judicial changes and withstands numerous temporal and spatial placebo checks across over nine million randomly sequenced donor samples. |
| title | Assaults on Judicial Independence under the Pretense of Modernization: Evidence from Venezuela |
| topic | General Economics Economics Econometrics Applications |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10681 |