The Politics of Selecting the Bench from the Bar: The Legal Profession and Partisan Incentives to Introduce Ideology into Judicial Selection

Using a data set capturing the ideological positioning of nearly half a million US judges and lawyers, we present evidence showing how ideology affects the selection of judges across federal and state judiciaries. We document that the higher the court, the more it deviates ideologically from the ide...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of law & economics 2017-11, Vol.60 (4), p.559-595
Main Authors: Bonica, Adam, Sen, Maya
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attorneys
Courts
Datasets
Elections
Ideology
Incentives
Judges & magistrates
Jurisdiction
Legal professions
Partisanship
Political appointments
Politicians
Politics
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Using a data set capturing the ideological positioning of nearly half a million US judges and lawyers, we present evidence showing how ideology affects the selection of judges across federal and state judiciaries. We document that the higher the court, the more it deviates ideologically from the ideology of attorneys, which suggests that ideology plays a strong role in judicial selection. We also show that ideology plays stronger roles in jurisdictions where judges are selected via political appointments or partisan elections. Our findings suggest that ideology is an important component of judicial selection primarily when using ideology leads to expected benefits to politicians, when the jurisdiction’s selection process allows ideology to be used, and when it concerns the most important courts. This study is the first to provide a direct ideological comparison across judicial tiers and between judges and lawyers and to explain how and why American courts become politicized.
ISSN:0022-2186
1537-5285
DOI:10.1086/696575