Democracy and funding for legal institutions

I heard an interesting paper at the Yale Workshop on the Rule of Law over the weekend.  Stanfurd political scientists Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Beatriz Magaloni have a paper on Democratic Accountability and the Rule of Law in Mexico in which they show among other things how funding for rule of law institutions has increased after 1994. I thought this would be an interesting comparative variable to examine across countries, though one might also see increasing funding for legal institutions in an autocracy, such as China. Ultimately one would like to have a measure of effective constraint by particular legal institutions as an independent variable.

   --TG