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similar levels of judicial independence in practice. Interviews by one of the authors with justices in
both counties confirm that the justices are unanimous in their view that they have a very substantial
degree of independence in practice and that none fears any political retaliation by any government
official based on the policy content of decisions they make. As a result, the judges in both Canada
and England assert that they do not need to engage in any strategic calculations before deciding on
their case outcomes to avoid political sanctions.
According to strategic accounts, then, the degree of judicial independence in practice is a
crucial determinant of the extent to which judges engage in strategic decision making. If the
degree of independence is high, judges can be expected to vote either their private attitudinal
preferences or their personal understanding of what the law requires without engaging in any
strategic calculation. However, when judges lack any significant degree of independence they may
strategically modify their decisions to avoid sanctions from the current government.
These established notions of when and how strategic calculations will influence judicial
decision making have recently been challenged by a set of innovative and provocative theoretical
arguments put forward by Helmke (2002; 2005) under the rubric of “Strategic Defection
Theory.” This work is a significant contribution to take the strategic model of judicial decision-
making to the comparative arena. Helmke begins by noting that judges on the Supreme Court of
Argentina frequently voted against the government in spite of an apparent absence of judicial
independence. She then develops a rational choice explanation for the question of why judges
decide against the government in weakly institutionalized settings, even against those rulers who
nominated them in the first place. The theory states that justices adjust their decisions in cases
involving the government, depending on the underlying political environment: When the
government is stable, popular and there are no potentially viable threats against it, the Court
Convention