Tomoo Inoue

The Philippine Supreme Court is considered one of Asia’s most activist courts. During the regime of President Rodrigo Duterte (2016–22), however, concerns grew about its independence. This article investigates determinants of the Court’s behavior since the country’s return to democracy in 1987, with particular attention to “loyalty effects”—the likelihood that justices will vote for the government more often when the president who appointed them is in office. Drawing on a data set of seventy major political cases and sociobiographic profiles of the eighty-six justices who voted in them, we test for variables, including freshman effects and strategic defection toward the end of a presidential term. We find that early years on the bench are closely associated with a vote for the appointer’s administration, and the end of a presidential term is weakly associated with a vote against. Under the Duterte administration, voting preferences have been more aligned with the appointer, and factional alliances of justices appointed by different presidential administrations mirror political alignments. These results have practical implications for the fragile constitutional democracy in the Philippines and contribute to understanding of loyalty dynamics in less institutionalized judicial settings.

<title>Abstract</title>Since its inception in 1957, Malaysia’s Federal Court (FC) has often been embroiled in high-profile decisions that have dramatically shaped the rule of law and constitutional practice in Malaysia. Recent political change has renewed hope that the FC can reassert its early role as an independent and impartial arbiter of political conflict. This paper investigates determinants of the FC’s behaviour since 1960. It draws on a unique data set of 102 major political cases and socio-biographic profiles of the 73 judges who voted in these cases. After describing patterns of court decisions across time and judges, we test specifically for the impact on their decisions of the 1988 judicial crisis, length of time on the bench, the terms of successive prime ministers, and judges’ personal attributes, such as religion and ethnicity. Ethnicity, appointment after 1988, and the appointing prime minister proved to be closely associated with the direction of voting. We then position the results in the context of Malaysia’s evolving constitutional democracy and discuss their implications for students of comparative judicial politics.

The Constitutional Court of Indonesia is considered one of Asia’s most activist courts. Here we investigate empirically possible determinants of the decisions of its judges over the period 2003–18. The findings are based on a unique data set of 80 high-profile political cases, complemented by data on the socio-biographic profiles of 26 judges who served during that period. Testing for common perceptions of the Constitutional Court since its inception, we first describe patterns in judicial decision-making across time and court composition before testing specifically for the impact of the judges’ professional backgrounds, presidential administrations, the influence of the Chief Justice, and cohort behaviour. The analysis finds declining dissent among justices on the bench over time and also provides evidence of strategic behaviour of justices at the ending of their own terms. But there is little statistical evidence that judicial behaviour has been affected by work background (except for those coming from the executive branch), appointment track or generation – hence suggesting that justices seem to retain more independence than the public seems to perceive. We then discuss the results in the context of Indonesia’s evolving constitutional democracy and look at the implications for comparative studies of judicial behaviour.

To what extent do informal networks shape the decisions of the Supreme Court of the Philippines? Though often raised in the Philippines, this question has never been studied empirically. To answer it, we constructed a set of social network variables to assess how informal ties, based on university connections and work affiliations, may have influenced the court’s decisions between 1986 and 2015 in 47 politically high-profile cases. Providing statistically significant evidence for the effects of political influence (presidential appointments) and hierarchical pressure (the vote of the Chief Justice) on related networks, our analysis suggests a continuing tension on the Supreme Court bench between professionalism and informality. Because the findings advance both theoretical and empirical understanding of larger issues at the intersection of courts and society throughout the region, we recommend more attention to the role of judicial networks, external to the courts as well as within them.

This paper employs block recursive structural VAR models with Markov switching for modeling monetary policy and private sector behavior of the Japanese economy. By estimating the endogenous structural breaks, we investigate the existence, number, and nature of breaks possibly implied by the monetary policy adopted between 1975 and 2002. Results indicate that the Japanese economic system is best described by a non-absorbing two-state model, with major break happened around 1996. We also confirm that the interest rate monetary policy was effective before 1996, while monetary base shocks are identified as monetary policy shocks only after 1996. J. Japanese Int. Economies 22 (3) (2008) 320-342. Faculty of Economics, Seikei University, 3-3-1 Kichijoji Kitamachi, Musashino, Tokyo, Japan; Faculty of Economics and IGSSS, Yokohama National University, Japan. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This article tests economies of scale and economies of scope for the property-casualty insurance companies in Japan. We fit a composite cost function to a set of Japanese firms over the period from 1980 to 1995 and employ an error components model. Our main findings are as follows. First, statistically significant economies of scale are observed in both Japanese firms and foreign firms operating in Japan. Second, economies of scope are also statistically significant for Japanese firms and most of the foreign insurers between the "third sector" products and the rest of the property-casualty insurance lines.

A nonlinear growth process has its change equal to a positive function of the lagged series plus an innovation whose variance depends on the lagged series. If the innovations were identically zero the resulting deterministic trends take a wide variety of shapes. The balance between growth in mean and variance to guarantee eventual growth of the process is determined, the relationship between stochastic and deterministic trends found, parametric and nonparametric estimates of the functions considered and applications analysed. The natural bivariate generalization is found to produce a form of cointegration and a nonlinear error-correction model. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science S.A.