Monitoring High Court Rulings in New Democracies

This article explains when and why high courts in new democracies engage in post-decision monitoring to secure compliance with their rulings. We develop a theory of strategic monitoring in which judges, lacking enforcement capacity, selectively deploy oversight mechanisms in response to reputational risks generated by social pressure. Leveraging an original dataset of 6,093 decisions from Ecuador’s Constitutional Court (2015–2024), we show that the presence and intensity of amicus curiae participation significantly increase the likelihood of monitoring, while budgetary resources and political salience do not. These findings indicate that courts engage in institutional triage, prioritizing cases where non-compliance is most likely to generate public scrutiny. The article advances a large-N perspective on post-decision enforcement highlighting the pivotal role of civil-society participation in strengthening judicial compliance.