Assembling the Puzzle of Judicial Reform: A Review of the Analytical Frameworks

The judicial reforms undertaken during the last thirty years have generated abundant literature by authors with training in legal, political, or economic sciences. Most of these researchers acknowledge the extreme complexity of these reforms and use analytical frameworks specific to their discipline to understand the underlying issues and find possible solutions. Such studies typically aim to identify the strategies and tactics followed by the reformers, as well as the role of the main stakeholders (both within the justice institutions and outside) in the outcome of the reforms. The combination of these three disciplines in the study of the reforms through methodologies such as “process tracing/analytical narratives,” including elements of historical analysis, provides an integrated framework that should enable new progress in the study of a key area of democratic governance. To that end, based on the author's experience, this article presents a selection of the relevant literature about judicial reforms, and highlights the role of quantitative and perception data in a field where citizen expectations are increasing, but reliable and comparable information is scarce.