Cómo capturar el proceso de polarización judicial en contextos de declive democrático: la doctrina de la Suprema Corte mexicana sobre violaciones al procedimiento legislativo

Abstract This article contributes to the systematic study of judicial polarization in contexts of democratic decline. We argue that the two main empirical approaches to the study of polarization —the ideological and the affective— are limited in fully capturing the nature of judicial polarization in such processes because: (a) they fail to capture the nature of the dissent that defines this type of polarization, (b) they do not grasp the central role of high courts and (c) they fail to account for the incremental nature of these processes. To address these limitations, we propose an alternative methodology that allows us to measure and visually represent the polarization process in its different stages and to map the positions of judges in relation to different normative parameters. Finally, we apply this methodology to analyze the recent polarization of the Mexican Supreme Court by examining its doctrine on procedural violations in the legislative process.