Speaker: Manoel Gehrke (University of Pisa)
When: 18 March – 16.00 CET
Where: Online. Register to join here
Reversing Corruption Convictions of Former Heads of Government: Dependent High Courts as Institutional Fail-Safes for Political Elites
Authors: Luciano Da Ros (Department of Sociology and Political Science, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil) and Manoel Gehrke (Department of Political Science, University of Pisa, Italy)
When former heads of government are criminally convicted for corruption by the judiciary of the countries they once ruled, are these decisions definitive, or are they later reversed? Particularly, what role do the high courts play in overturning these decisions? This study hypothesizes that high courts that are more politically dependent vis-à-vis the lower courts have higher chances of reversing convictions than high courts that are relatively more independent. That is, the gap in judicial independence between the highest and the other courts makes reversals of corruption convictions of former heads of government more likely. The article tests this institutional fail-safe hypothesis using the novel Heads of Government Convicted of Crimes (HGCC) dataset, which includes all convictions of former heads of government (presidents, prime ministers and dictators) between 1946 and 2022. Overall, the results indicate that even when one of the most severe forms of accountability are deployed, the room for reversal is significant and may be embedded into the institutional design as a fail-safe for political elites against anticorruption policies, such as enhancing the independence of the lower courts, whose costs may be excessive.
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In this third edition, Manoel Gehrke, postdoctoral researcher at University of Pisa, will discuss the paper “Reversing Corruption Convictions of Former Heads of Government: Dependent High Courts as Institutional Fail-Safes for Political Elites”.
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