El rol político del juez electoral : el Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones de la República de Costa Ricaun análisis comparado

Resumo

The Electoral Supreme Tribunal of the Republic of Costa Rica is a particular institution because it has the rank and independence of the Government Branches, but also because it concentrates administrative and jurisdictional functions and it practices the second one as a special constitutional tribunal. This diversity of functions, inside which is also the competence of interpretation of the electoral law, involves an institutional prominence that exceeds the administrative-electoral and jurisdictional-constitutional levels and stands out his mark as a political actor. Given this scenario, the research proposes a first academic approach to the electoral judge from judicial politics, with the premise to verify what factors explain the political role of the electoral judge and assuming as a research hypothesis that this role is favored under certain conditions: electoral conflict of closed results, higher parliamentary fragmentation, extent of the jurisdictional electoral competences and presence of subjective elements of the electoral judge. Besides that explicative model, the thesis proposes a theoretical model for the political role of the electoral judge through a conceptual delimitation with three dimensions: quasi-legislator function, accountability and responsiveness communication, suggesting a typology of political action scenarios and electoral judges, as well as a taxonomy for the behavior of those judges. The investigation carries out a diachronic comparative study of the Costa Rican electoral judge during the last 20 years (1990 to 2010).