Seeing Like a Court Judicial Agency in Autocratic Regimes and Transition Politics: The Case of Egypt

Abstract

This dissertation -- a comparative study -- seeks to explain judicial conduct and judicial preferences outside the prisms of "judicial empowerment," "judicial independence," and "judicial activism." It articulates a theory of judicial agency -- what judges want, and how their wants change and adapt in different political settings. I posit judicial agency as a fluid equilibrium among three sets of primary commitments that judges hold: professional (to state legality), associational (to other members of the judicial corps as a status and corporate group), and regime commitments (to the rules and norms structuring government authority). In autocratic regimes where judges and courts are allowed to enact their professional commitments, they are more likely to reciprocate by upholding as well their regime commitments. And vice versa. This complex account of judicial agency explains how courts in autocratic regimes may simultaneously appear activist *and* safeguard the regime's core interests. This study use the judicial agency framework to explain how the judicial conduct of Egyptian courts varied between the Nasser tenure (1954-1970) and the Sadat and Mubarak tenures (1970-2011). It then explains how judicial agency played out during the heightened political uncertainty of the "Arab Spring" period in Egypt (2011-2013). In the penultimate chapter I show how judicial agency and judicialization interact with and aggravate political uncertainty during recent episodes of contention in Turkey, Pakistan, Russia and Hungary. This work contributes to the scholarship on comparative judicial politics, authoritarianism and democratization.