Compliance with High Court decisions in comparative perspective

Lacking both the "purse and the sword", how do high courts ensure incumbents comply with judicial decisions? A vast literature in comparative law and courts suggests that widespread popular beliefs in courts' legitimacy work as a public enforcement mechanism for judicial institutions facing threats of non-compliance. This is not necessarily the case. First, compliance might also exist without legitimate institutions, as in the case of coercion within a dictatorship. Second, the public might perceive an institution as legitimate but defy its orders due to a cost-benefit analysis, mainly when the probability that the court takes detrimental actions against the defiant is low. Third, the argument assumes that citizens are vigilant in observing the subtleties of court rulings and incumbent compliance to hold political actors accountable or reward them. This assumption may not hold in a context where the average citizen shows little interest in these specific political outcomes. Fourth, even in the absence of the latter point, individuals may have other policy concerns shaping their electoral preferences, leaving resistance to the judiciary as only a marginal factor influencing their voting choices. On the other hand, extant literature has over fixated in analysing cases of executive non-compliance, thereby leaving us with limited knowledge about the role of other public actors such as congress or independent governmental agencies, or even private actors. From my perspective, the fundamental factor contributing to resistance against the court is far more intricate and nuanced than what the legitimacy approach suggests. This paper advances an alternative analytic framework for explaining compliance with judicial decisions. To do so, I draw from the empirical literature on regulatory compliance. I argue that non-compliance should be understood in terms of goal framing. In this context, I advocate understanding judicial compliance as an outcome stemming from the interplay among diverse actors—namely, the court, plaintiffs, and defendants (both public and private)—each pursuing disparate goals that extend beyond individual utility to encompass factors such as social approval. I illustrate this approach with an extensive range of examples from different courts in Latin America.