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 abstract 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 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 we build different datasets, which allow us to monitor every party’s decision regarding each bill along the legislative process. In addition to data on 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, it is taken into consideration the court ideological composition, as well as I consider the judges internal dynamics, rules design factors and the political context.