Small‐Group Dynamics, Ideology, and Decision Making on the US Courts of Appeals

Abstract

There is some evidence that judges who specialize in particular legal areas vote in more ideologically consistent ways than do nonspecialists. Upon replicating those individual results across multiple legal areas in the US courts of appeals, we assess how this increasing reliance on ideology by specialists affects decision making by others on a three‐judge panel. We find that judges who serve with a specialist are especially likely to vote in a manner consistent with the ideological position of the specialist with whom they serve. These results suggest that specialization has the potential to facilitate panel effects across numerous legal policy areas.

Who Controls the Immigration Bureaucracy? The Relative Influence of the Three Branches Over Asylum Policy Implementation

“…To control for congressional preferences, we employ a trichotomous measure where values of “–1” represent Republican control of the House of Representatives and Senate, values of “0” represent split party control of the House and Senate, and values of “1” represent Democratic control of the House and Senate. We employ the measure Circuit Democratic , extending data from Miller and Curry (2017). It is the ratio of active Democrats to active Republicans on a circuit in a given year.…”