Ethnicity and Judicial Decision-making: Evidence from the Kenyan High Courts

• In Event: The Politics of Judicial Decision-making in the Developing World

Abstract

Do judicial outcomes depend on judicial identity? Research on the determinants of judicial behavior have largely focused on the experience of advanced democracies, most notably the U.S. Considerably less attention has been paid to questions of judicial identity and performance in emerging democracies. This paper addresses this gap by turning to Kenya, a multiethnic society that has recently undergone a massive reform of the judiciary aimed at reducing corruption and bias and improving access to justice. However, the extent to which ethnicity plays a role in judicial decision-making in such contexts remains underexplored. We examine whether ethnic bias plays a role in judicial outcomes by focusing on criminal sentencing patterns in the Kenyan High Court. Using an original dataset of over 21,000 criminal appeals from 2003-2017 and for offenses ranging from petty theft to murder, we exploit the conditional random assignment of judges to criminal cases to estimate the effect of judicial ethnicity on sentencing severity. We specifically test whether the ethnicity of judges predicts rulings in favor of co-ethnic appellants. Our findings contribute to recent debates on the determinants of equitable justice in developing contexts.

Authors

• Danny Choi, University of Pittsburgh

• Fiona Shen-Bayh, College of William and Mary

• J. Andrew Harris, New York University Abu Dhabi