Estimating Judicial Ideology

摘要

Substantial scholarship has documented that the ideology of judges plays an important role in shaping their judicial behavior. The accumulated research goes back decades, to the 1940s and 1950s. Although most of the work has focused on the US Supreme Court, evidence of the important role of judicial ideology in predicting judicial rulings has been found at the other levels of state and federal courts. The effects of judicial ideology do not just involve topics of federal interest, such as civil rights or voting rights, but also cases that are less ostensibly political, such as the sentencing decisions of criminal defendants. This evidence has been built on a number of measures of judicial ideology: the party of the politician who appointed the judge, scores based on voting patterns, informed opinions like newspaper editorials before a Supreme Court justice is appointed, campaign contributions made by judges before they were appointed, analysis of text for clues about political ideology, and others. We also show that judges have become more polarized.