Presidential predominance over the nomination and stability of members of the judiciary has always been a matter of concern in Latin American presidential systems. In the last years, however, the selection and approval of lower court judges has been notably regulated, as several of these countries have created judicial councils. A main goal of this paper is to empirically assess whether the creation of a Judicial Council in Argentina in 1998 has actually constrained the power of the President in the nomination and appointment of judges. In other words, we analyze how this new institution co-exits with a President who, according to the constitution, selects a candidate from the proposed threesome who has to be confirmed by the Senate afterwards. The paper is based on a novel dataset that includes all appointments of federal and national judges since democratisation in 1983 – with participation of the Judicial Council since 1998- until December 2009. The dataset has unique information about how the Council selects candidates for positions in the judicial branch, but it also pays attention to the whole process of selection starting with the opening of a vacancy, following with the Council’s selection and proposal to the president, the presidential selection of one of the candidates and its transfer to the Senate, the parliamentary treatment of the candidate, and, finally, the appointment. We conduct a statistical analysis by considering the length of the appointment processes at different stages as the outcome variable. We seek to explore the impact of political (such as the majority status of the ruling president) and institutional factors (such as changes in appointment rules). The paper also illustrates the argument with case-studies of judicial appointments.
