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This article explores the impact of democratization on the resolution of executive-legislative crises in Latin American presidential regimes. The author studies 27 episodes in which the executive branch closed the legislature or the legislature removed the chief executive from office between 1950 & 2000. It is hypothesized that the democratization of Latin American presidential systems has hindered the ability of presidents to challenge the legislature & encouraged the emergence of congressional supremacy (i.e., the capacity of congress to impeach the president if a serious conflict emerges). Three causal mechanisms account for this outcome: (a) a lower likelihood of military intervention, (b) the elimination of constitutional tools used by authoritarian presidents to dissolve congress, & (c) greater stability in the constitutional environment. After discussing the limitations of conventional maximum likelihood tests, the author assesses this hypothesis using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative model. 4 Tables, 3 Figures, 45 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2005.]

It is widely assumed that the Supreme Court of the United States has established supremacy over contested constitutional questions, with the power to make final determinations of constitutional meaning. Since the 1960s, most scholars have assumed that legislatures and courts are engaged in a power struggle in which countermajoritarian courts can assert their will over majoritarian legislatures. More recently, a new generation of scholarship has demonstrated that judicial power often expands as a result of the willful empowerment of the judiciary by actors in other branches. Most scholars working with the latter framework, however, do not dispute that the United States has a regime of judicial supremacy—they simply see the political empowerment of courts as an explanation for why judicial supremacy has emerged despite the initially weak position of the judiciary. I argue that the insights of the political empowerment literature should be pressed further. It makes little sense to use the general label "judicial supremacy" for a system in which judicial power remains dependent on choices made by other political actors. Examining several cases that are generally seen as canonical examples of assertions of judicial supremacy, I find that courts were unable to settle constitutional debates, and in addition often either were unable to achieve their policy aims or did not actually require other political actors to do anything. The logic of new empirical findings about the sources of judicial power should compel scholars to question whether aggressive assertions of supremacy in judicial opinions are in fact accurate descriptions of how judicial power functions in the United States.

Conflicts between the Supreme Court & the president are usually regarded as grave challenges to the Constitution & a threat to judicial independence. Such claims misrepresent the nature of these presidential challenges, however. In doing so, they paint an unflattering & inaccurate portrait of American politics & underestimate the strength of American constitutionalism. This article reexamines historical presidential challenges to the judicial authority to interpret constitutional meaning. It argues that rather than being unprincipled attacks on judicial independence, such challenges are best regarded as historically specific efforts to reconsider the meaning & future of American constitutional traditions in times of political crisis & constitutional uncertainly. Adapted from the source document.

This article explores the Malaysian judiciary's approach toward interpreting the Federal Constitution of Malaysia and situates it within the context of the nation's political and constitutional history. It traces the judiciary's movement toward a more rights-oriented approach followed by its more recent retreat, which has been marked by strict formalism and insularity in several appellate court decisions. This article argues that the Malaysian courts' journey toward constitutional redemption has been uneven so far. In order to reclaim its constitutional position as a co-equal branch of government, the Malaysian judiciary must be willing to uphold its constitutional duty to assert its commitment to constitutional supremacy and the rule of law.