Friday, March 14, 2014
Sales Conference (Omni Shoreham)
Democratic politics in Serbia has been very competitive since 2000 but this has not produced greater independence of judiciary, as one would have expected based on the theories of judicial independence as politicians’ insurance policy for the period after an electoral defeat. Instead, political parties in Serbia have reached a bad equilibrium, in which parties prompted by the fear of loosing the next elections strive to increase party control over judiciary through mass politicized appointments. In the same period Croatian politics has been marked by much less electoral uncertainty and fewer government turnovers. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in the similar pattern of politicized judiciary. However, in the Croatian case this equilibrium has been strongly challenged in the last phase of the EU accession negotiations. In contrast, EU’s efforts to tackle the problem of politicized judiciary in Serbia have achieved only limited successes due to the continued dominance of foreign policy issues in the negotiations with the country. I document gradual divergence in the levels of judicial independence in two cases in the direction that goes contrary to the predictions of the insurance policy argument. I explain that the electoral competitiveness can have both negative and positive consequences for judiciary depending on the quality of political competition, and not simply depending on its intensity. I make my arguments through process-tracing of three important episodes in executive-judicial relations in both Serbia and Croatia since 2000, relaying on an analysis of legal documents and on the interviews with the key actors.
