Revisiting Political Ideology in the US District Courts

• In Event: Ideology in the Federal Courts: Measurement and Theory

Abstract

We use a newly constructed dataset of all civil rights cases between 1995 and 2016 in seven U.S. District Courts to reevaluate the differences in decision-making between judges appointed by Democratic presidents and judges appointed by Republican presidents. We make four main contributions. First, by analyzing the ultimate outcome of cases rather than the outcome at any particular decision point, we preserve the causal identification opportunity provided by as-if random case assignment. Second, we confirm the common finding that outcomes do not change, on average, as a result of assignment to a Republican appointee. Third, we demonstrate that the low average treatment effects miss the fact that Republican appointees have positive effects in some cases and negative effects in others. Finally, we show that the effect of assignment to a Republican appointee can increase substantially if one focuses attention on the ``hardest'' cases. For example, in the ``hardest'' 9% of cases, we estimate that assignment to a Republican appointee *decreases* settlement rate by ~11% in some cases and *increases* it by ~2.5% in the other cases.

Authors

• Ryan Hubert, University of California, Davis

• Ryan Copus, Harvard Law School