Public Trust, Judicial Independence and Social Media Engagement of Latin American High Courts

Abstract

Most Latin American judiciaries experience low levels of public trust, and many high courts in the region suffer attacks from political actors. Such interference constitutes a serious contestation of judicial independence. The literature suggests that courts can defend against such attacks by building alliances with the broader public. Public trust is central to build such alliances. Courts may increase trust through an opening to the public. Latin American constitutional and supreme courts have been pioneering in engaging with the public through a variety of means. Comparing globally, they can be considered the most active ones in using social media for presenting and promoting their work. This article investigates how the behaviour of Latin American high courts in Twitter (nowadays ‘X’) is shaped by the different levels of trust and political attacks experienced by the courts. It distinguishes between an informational, an educational and a self-promotional purpose of a court’s use of Twitter. It uses data from Latinobarómetro, V-Dem, as well as an original dataset of tweets by Latin American high courts to assess the respective behaviour on Twitter. The analysis of six cases (Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay) shows that courts with lower levels of trust tend to be more active in social media than courts with higher levels of trust and that the former tend to produce more self-promotional or educational content than purely informational one. Regarding the level of political attacks, no clear effects on the court behaviour on Twitter were identified.