Litigating and Adjudicating Electoral Disputes in Hybrid Regimes: Evidence from Zambia

Under what conditions will courts serve as guardians for free and fair elections? Understanding judicial behavior in electoral disputes is crucial as the politicization of courts is at the heart of contemporary autocratization efforts at the same time as courts in backsliding and hybrid regimes increasingly are asked to settle electoral disputes. Yet, while recent scholarship has examined losing candidates' strategic decisions to litigate and the consequences of judicial decisions for public opinion, there is still a dearth of scholarship concerning the politics of how judges adjudicate electoral disputes. This paper leverages a comprehensive dataset on electoral disputes in Zambian courts, which are routinely asked to intervene in elections. We examine both the political and career considerations that influence electoral justice and how litigation patterns are shaped by anticipation of strategic judicial decision-making. Our preliminary expectations are that judicial review allows political elites to challenge electoral results through legal means, but that judicial decision-making is constrained both by judges' reliance on political actors to enforce their decisions and because individual judges may fear sanctions from powerful political actors. Judges can therefore be expected to be reluctant to invalidate results in constituencies won by the ruling party. Anticipating judicial restraint, opposition parties will also be less likely to challenge such results in court.