Viviana Baraybar-Hidalgo

(With Paula Muñoz, Universidad del Pacífico; and Yamilé Guiber, Cornell University)

This project focuses on judicial backlash and democratic regression in Peru, tracing how Congress has undermined judicial independence and politicised the Attorney General’s Office, tilting the balance of power toward the legislature.

This project builds on my first book Prosecutors, Voters, and the Criminalization of Corruption in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2023), where my coauthors and I show that these high-profile investigations lead to backlash.

In this new project, we offer a detailed account of backlash against the judiciary in a country currently experiencing a transition to what some authors refer to as “legislative authoritarianism”.

We scraped and analysed data on laws and proposed bills from 2006 until now, to look at changes in legislative action, identify moments in which Congress has attempted to reduce the autonomy and capacity of the judiciary institutions, and identify extensions of these attacks to other institutions.