39
traditions of judicial independence. The preliminary failure to find the expected strategic
defection in the Philippines suggests that this might be an important case to explore in greater
detail to gain greater leverage on the conditions in which the theory provides useful insights.
South Africa also appears to be a good candidate for future research. Although the relatively
crude preliminary analysis discovered behavior that may be consistent with strategic defection;
further research is needed to determine whether all or some of the justices may actually have
been acting in concert with government preferences,
7
in order to ease a transition to a new
regime that the current government had come to accept as inevitable. Finally, the brief narrative
analysis of events in Venezuela supports the suggestion of Helmke that Venezuela may provide a
useful place to examine the applicability of strategic defection theory.
A Research Strategy for a Cross National Test of Strategic Defection Theory
In order to obtain the greatest theoretical leverage from this research project, one must
make sure that it is possible to replicate Helmke’s analysis in other jurisdictions. Thus, it is
necessary to have enough data to figure out the preferences, beliefs and expectations of the
relevant political actors (and most especially of justices). It is also required to have an extensive
knowledge of the institutional and structural features of each country, and a clear understanding
of the operationalization of the relevant variables, and the inclusion of any other relevant
covariates that might explain judicial behavior.
Based on her discussion laid out on chapter 4 of Courts under constraints, and
considering our comments in the prior sections, we summarized the issues to be addressed. The
following discussion intertwines arguments about the data, the coding process and the basic
theoretical framework in which we will operate.
7
After De Klerk’s 1990 speech.
Convention