ORIGINS FOR THE JUDICIALIZATION OF POLITICS IN BRAZIL

HISTORICAL AND INSTITUTIONAL ASPECTS

Abstract

The judicialization of politics has been subject of intense academic debate in the last two decades. There are different approaches diverging about its extent, reasons and even about its own existence as phenomenon. Mainstream legal literature describe judicialization as outcome for sociological (e.g. delusion with democracy), political (e.g. weakening of legislative power) and legal changes (e.g. increased access to judiciary and social rights), while political scientists tend to focus on institutional aspects, describing judicialization as resulting from strategic choices made by political actors within institutional constraints. This paper relies in the latter case, aiming to describe where those institutional rules came from and how they were enforced. Therefore, we make a brief review of academic literature about the origins of judicialization in Brazil, describing its origins on the American Constitution and its influence on Brazil’s constitutional design. Finally, we conclude that successive constitutional changes led to a judicial review highly focused on federal disputes and that after 1988’s new democratic constitution, broad numbers of petitioners received standing rights in judicial review cases before Brazil’s Supreme Court (STF), leading to strong increase in judicial review cases before the STF and thus explaining the judicialization phenomenon.