The influence of abstract review on the legislative process: Does constitutional justice work as check and balance for democracy?

This paper analyzes the influence of constitutional review mechanism on the legislative process through an empirical analysis of parties’ behavior from the moment a bill is introduced until there is a potential court ruling. The goal is to study to what extent constitutional review contributes to parliament’s consensus building or on the contrary if parties uses it as an electoral weapon. Theoretical models have described a potential “auto-limitation” behavior in parties induced by court aversion attitudes -scholars suppose high costs from vetoing a law- that could favor inter- party agreements. Yet, there are no systematic empirical analyses on this question due to data limitations. Based in web scrapping, text parsing and text-reuse methods different data-sets are built, which allow us to monitor every party’s decision regarding each bill along the legislative process -including the potential court revision-. In addition to data on the characteristics of individual judges, the court plenary composition and cases of abstract review the paper considers data on bill’s proposals and the amendatory process –number and type of amendments, and whether they are incorporated into final legislation- to measure the parties' movements through its policy positions. As exploratory variables, we take into consideration the court ideological composition, internal dynamics and working procedures, as well as contextual factors, such as the politicization of issue and the government and parliamentary geometry. This research is especially relevant to explore empirically the potential influence of the court in parliamentary politics, public policies, and legislative analyses and to study the compromises that parties strategically make and their motivation.