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This article assesses how the institutional context of decision making on three-judge panels of the federal Court of Appeals affects the impact that gender and race have on judicial decisions. Our central question is whether and how racial minority and women judges influence legal policy on issues thought to be of particular concern to women and minorities when serving on appellate panels which decide cases by majority rule. Proper analysis of this question requires investigating whether women and minority judges influence the decisions of other panel members. We find that the norm of unanimity on panels grants women influence over outcomes even when they are outnumbered on a panel.

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Panel data are a very valuable resource for finding empirical solutions to political science puzzles. Yet numerous published studies in political science that use panel data to estimate models with dynamics have failed to take into account important estimation issues, which calls into question the inferences we can make from these analyses. The failure to account explicitly for unobserved individual effects in dynamic panel data induces bias and inconsistency in cross-sectional estimators. The purpose of this paper is to review dynamic panel data estimators that eliminate these problems. I first show how the problems with cross-sectional estimators arise in dynamic models for panel data. I then show how to correct for these problems using generalized method of moments estimators. Finally, I demonstrate the usefulness of these methods with replications of analyses in the debate over the dynamics of party identification.

This article employs a three-pronged approach to test competing theories regarding the size of coalitions required for passing legislation prior to the adoption of cloture in the Senate. We compare predictions generated by a model derived from the theory of pivotal politics with those generated by the theory of universalism. To test these predictions, we first examine coalition sizes on the passage of significant legislation. Second, we analyze the size of coalitions on dilatory motions as a predictor of success in defeating legislation. Finally, we examine coalition sizes on tariff legislation to assess the degree to which politics in this policy area were majoritarian. We find that a pivotal politics-based model incorporating the median voter and veto pivot generally outperforms universalism in explaining lawmaking patterns in the pre-cloture Senate. Narrow majorities were quite successful at legislating, although minority obstruction fostered uncertainty about the threshold required to force a final vote when adjournment loomed.