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The Role of Judge Gender and Ideology in Hiring Female Law Clerks
Abstract
Federal law clerks play a vital role in the development and implementation of the law. Yet, women remain underrepresented in these positions. We suggest that one reason for this underrepresentation may be differences in hiring practices among judges in the federal judiciary. Specifically, we hypothesize that male judges and conservative judges may be less likely to hire female law clerks than female judges and liberal judges for two reasons. First, gendered attitudes held by judges may make some judges prone to hire women and/or others more resistant to these hires. Second, due to ideological asymmetries between the law clerk pool and judges in the federal judiciary, conservative judges and male judges may be less likely to hire women law clerks. Using data on clerks hired in the federal judiciary between 1995 and 2005, we find support for both mechanisms.
... Since Peppers' Courtiers of the Marble Palace (2006), many studies have examined the selection of Supreme Court clerks (e.g., Kromphardt 2014;Kaheny et al. 2015;Badas and Stauffer 2023;Badas, Sanders, and Stauffer 2024) and the influence law clerks wield while serving the judge (e.g., Ward and Weiden 2006;Peppers and Zorn 2008;Black and Boyd 2012;Blake, Hacker, and Hopwood 2015;Kromphardt 2015;2017;Mascini and Holvast 2024;Bonica et al. 2019). Similarly, quite a few scholars have explored the influence of attorneys on the US Supreme Court (e.g., McGuire 1995;Johnson, Wahlbeck, and Spriggs 2006;Corley 2008;Black and Owens 2013;Gleason, Jones, and McBean 2019;Gleason 2020;Nelson and Epstein 2022) and other courts (e.g., Haynie and Sill 2007;Kaheny, Szmer, and Sarver 2011;Sheehan and Randazzo 2012;Szmer, Songer, and Bowie 2016). ...
Most Supreme Court (SCOTUS) clerk studies explore selection, or impact, during the clerkship. The existing research examining the benefits of clerking for those returning to the Court suggests relational expertise from clerking for a specific justice, not process expertise from the clerkship, enhances SCOTUS oral argument success. Our study suggests the benefits of prior appellate clerkships likely stem from both relational and process expertise. Specifically, justices tend to favor parties represented by former US Court of Appeals (USCA) clerks who never clerked for the SCOTUS and prior SCOTUS clerks, even when the clerk did not serve in the justice’s chambers.
Despite a growing body of literature examining the consequences of women’s inclusion among lobbyists, our understanding of the factors that lead to women’s initial emergence in the profession is limited. In this study, we propose that gender diversity among legislative targets incentivizes organized interests to hire women lobbyists, and thus helps to explain when and how women emerge as lobbyists. Using a comprehensive data set of registered lobbyist–client pairings from all American states in 1989 and 2011, we find that legislative diversity influences not only the number of lobby contracts held by women but also the number of former women legislators who become revolving-door lobbyists. This second finding further supports the argument that interests capitalize on the personal characteristics of lobbyists, specifically by hiring women to work in more diverse legislatures. Our findings have implications for women and politics, lobbying, and voice and political equality in the United States.
We review the substantial literature on estimating judicial ideology, from the US Supreme Court to the lowest state court. As a way to showcase the strengths and drawbacks of various measures, we further analyze trends in judicial polarization within the US federal courts. Our analysis shows substantial gaps in the ideology of judges appointed by Republican Presidents versus those appointed by Democrats. Similar to trends in Congressional polarization, the increasing gap is mostly driven by a rightward movement by judges appointed by Republicans. We conclude by noting important avenues for future research in the study of the ideology of judges.
It is well established that the race and gender of elected representatives influence the ways in which they legislate, but surprisingly little research exists on how race and gender interact to affect who is elected and how they behave once in office. How do race and gender affect who gets elected, as well as who is represented? What issues do elected representatives prioritize? Does diversity in representation make a difference? Race, Gender, and Political Representation takes up the call to think about representation in the United States as intersectional, and it measures the extent to which political representation is simultaneously gendered and raced.
Beth Reingold, Emory University
Kerry L. Haynie, Duke University
Kirsten Widner, University of Tennessee
Supreme Court justices employ law clerks to help them perform their duties. We study whether these clerks influence how justices vote in the cases they hear. We exploit the timing of the clerkship hiring process to link variation in clerk ideology to variation in judicial voting. To measure clerk ideology, we match clerks to the universe of disclosed political donations. We find that clerks exert modest influence on judicial voting overall, but substantial influence in cases that are high-profile, legally significant, or close decisions. We interpret these results to suggest that clerk influence occurs through persuasion rather than delegation of decision-making authority. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]
We extend the scaling methodology previously used in Bonica (2014) to jointly scale the American federal judiciary and legal profession in a common space with other political actors. The end result is the first dataset of consistently measured ideological scores across all tiers of the federal judiciary and the legal profession, including 840 federal judges and 380,307 attorneys. To illustrate these measures, we present two examples involving the U.S. Supreme Court. These data open up significant areas of scholarly inquiry.
This article investigates one causal mechanism that may explain why female judges on the federal appellate courts are more likely than men to side with plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases. To test whether personal experiences with inequality are related to empathetic responses to the claims of female plaintiffs, we focus on the first wave of female judges, who attended law school during a time of severe gender inequality. We find that female judges are more likely than their male colleagues to support plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases, but that this difference is seen only in judges who graduated law school between 1954 and 1975 and disappears when more recent law school cohorts of men and women judges are compared. These results suggest that the effect of gender as a trait is tied to the role of formative experiences with discrimination.
We investigate the origins of voters' expectations of greater female competency on ''compassion'' issues, such as dealing with poverty or the aged, and greater male competency on military and defense issues. We contrast two alternative explanations: gender-trait stereotypes, emphasizing a candidate's gender-linked personality traits; and gender-belief stereotypes, placing greatest importance on the differing political outlooks of male and female candidates. We test contrasting predictions from these two approaches with data from an experiment in which 297 undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to hear about a male or a female candidate with typically masculine or feminine traits. Overall, there was stronger support for the trait approach. Warm and expressive candidates were seen as better at compassion issues; instrumental candidates were rated as more competent to handle the military and economic issues. Moreover, masculine instrumental traits increased the candidate's perceived competence on a broader range of issues than the feminine traits of warmth and expressiveness. Finally, there was some limited support for the belief approach with gender-based expectations about the candidates' political views affecting their rated competency on compassion but not other types of political issues.
The determination that sexual harassment constituted “discrimination based on sex” under Title VII was first made by the lower federal courts, not Congress. Drawing from the literature on policy diffusion, this article examines the adoption of hostile work environment standards across the U.S. Courts of Appeals in the absence of controlling Supreme Court precedent. The results bolster recent findings about the influence of female judges on their male colleagues and suggest that in addition to siding with female plaintiffs, female judges also helped to shape legal rules that promoted gender equality in the workplace.
The question of whether voter bias exists toward female politicians remains unsettled. Although anecdotal accounts of gender inequality abound, systematic research demonstrates that women “do as well as men” when they run. Previous work suggests that these conflicting observations result from an omitted variables problem. Specifically, if women are higher quality than men, and if quality is omitted from models of vote-share, then voter bias may be concealed. Using a unique measure of incumbents’ political quality, the author’s research documents a sex-based quality gap and importantly, is the first to link the quality gap to the gender parity in electoral success.
This book, authored by two leading scholars of the Supreme Court and its policy making, systematically presents and validates the use of the attitudinal model to explain and predict Supreme Court decision making. In the process, it critiques the two major alternative models of Supreme Court decision making and their major variants: the legal and rational choice. Using the US Supreme Court Data Base, the justices' private papers, and other sources of information, the book analyzes the appointment process, certiorari, the decision on the merits, opinion assignments, and the formation of opinion coalitions. The book will be the definitive presentation of the attitudinal model as well as an authoritative critique of the legal and rational choice models. The book thoroughly reflects research done since the 1993 publication of its predecessor, as well as decisions and developments in the Supreme Court, including the momentous decision of Bush v. Gore.
We report the results of an experiment involving 820 randomly sampled adults. Half heard about a female Republican candidate for Congress. The other half learned of an otherwise identical male candidate. Democrat and Independent voters were more likely to trust, think qualified, view as a leader, and vote for the female Republican (contrasted with the male Republican). On the other hand, being female led to associations that hurt Republican women within their own party. We augment our experimental results by providing evidence that Republican women have done significantly worse than Democratic women in winning nominations in open-seat congressional districts.
Law clerks hold immense responsibilities and exert influence over the judges they work with. However, women remain underrepresented in these positions. We argue that one reason for this underrepresentation is that – like potential political candidates – female law students may have lower levels of ambition compared to men. Using a survey of student editors at thirty-three top law reviews, we find that there is a gender gap in ambition for clerkships with the Supreme Court and Federal Courts of Appeal. Examining potential sources of this difference, we find that while women view themselves to be just as qualified for these positions as men, men are more willing to apply with lower feelings of qualification. Likewise, while women and men report similar levels of encouragement, more encouragement is required before women express ambition to hold these posts. The findings presented here have implications for research on judicial politics, political ambition, and women’s representation.
Significant changes to the federal judicial confirmation process have manifested over the past decade, including multiple procedural reforms in the United States Senate. We argue the “nuclear option,” the reduction of the vote-threshold required to proceed to a final confirmation vote on judicial nominees (i.e., to invoke cloture) from three-fifths to a simple majority, contributed to a renewed escalation of partisan confirmation battles on which the Federalist Society capitalized. Pundits and politicians alike show growing concern about the role of interest groups, especially those associated with the conservative legal movement, in judicial nominations. The intersection of these two sets of changes raises questions about the contemporary judicial nominations process. Utilizing a novel dataset of Federalist Society (FedSoc) affiliates drawn from event listings (1993–2020), we analyze the interactive role of FedSoc affiliation with Senate procedural changes to the judicial confirmation process. We find affiliation with the Federalist Society, after the initial nuclear option was implemented, increases the probability of a circuit court nominee’s confirmation by approximately 20%.
Theoretical work argues that citizens gain important symbolic benefits when they are represented by gender-inclusive institutions. Despite the centrality of this claim in the literature, empirical evidence is mixed. In this article, I argue that these mixed findings are—in part—because many Americans hold beliefs about women’s inclusion that are out of step with reality. Leveraging variation in survey respondents’ beliefs about women’s representation, I examine how these perceptions influence attitudes toward Congress and state legislatures. In both cases, I find that believing women are included is associated with higher levels of external efficacy among both men and women. Using panel data, I then show that when citizens’ underestimations (overestimations) are corrected, their levels of efficacy increase (decrease), shedding further light on this relationship. The findings presented in this research add new theoretical insights into when, and how, Americans consider descriptive representation when evaluating the institutions that represent them.
Partisanship is the dominant force that dictates American electoral behavior. Yet Americans often participate in elections in which either the partisanship of candidates is unknown or candidates from the same party compete, rendering the partisan cue meaningless. In this research, we examine how candidate demographics—specifically gender—relate to voter behavior and candidate selection in these contexts. Leveraging survey data from same-party matchups in congressional elections (resulting from “top-two primaries”), we examine the relationship between candidate gender and undervoting and vote choice. We find that in same-party matchups, women candidates are associated with lower levels of undervoting among women voters. Furthermore, we find that in mixed-gender contests, women voters from both parties and Democratic men are more likely to favor female candidates. The findings presented here have important implications for the literatures on gender and politics, electoral politics, partisanship, and the design of electoral institutions.
This analysis updates through 2016 the gender gap analysis in voting and party identification published by Kaufmann and Petrocik 20 years ago. Some, e.g., Box-Steffensmeier, J. M., S. DeBoef, and T. M. Lin. 2004. “The Dynamics of the Partisan Gender Gap.” American Political Science Review 98 (3): 515–28 suggested that the original findings would diminish in magnitude, but the updated data show that the gender gap continues to reflect male-only changes in party identification. Public officials, political operatives, and the media misstate, sometimes specifically but often only by implication, the nature of the gap. Commentary highlights the lower level of support among women for the Republican Party in both the vote and party identification. Their support for the GOP is considerably lower than it is among men as this paper reaffirms. However, as Kaufmann, K. M., and J. R. Petrocik. 1999. “The Changing Politics of American Men: Understanding the Sources of the Gender Gap.” American Journal of Political Science 43 (3): 864–87 noted, the gap emerged and has continued to grow because of changed attitudes and behavior among men.
Gender bias in political discourse has been demonstrated in many settings, including the US Supreme Court. We investigate the effects of ideology and gender in verbal interactions during Supreme Court oral arguments. We theorize that all justices possess unconscious gender schemas that lead them to speak more during presentations by women but that liberal and female justices likely have conscious egalitarian values that diminish the manifestation of gender schemas. We find that conservative justices speak more when female lawyers are arguing but that liberal justices show no such effect, suggesting that consciously held attitudes can mitigate the expression of unconscious gender schemas.
Using traits conventionally believed to lead to elevation from the Circuit Courts to the Supreme Court, this paper uses an item response theory model to estimate latent elevation estimates for each Circuit Court judge nominated and confirmed between 1901 and 2017. I validate this measure by showing that it predicts which Circuit Court judges are promoted to the Supreme Court and which end up on the president’s Supreme Court shortlist. Furthermore, I investigate how the Senate strategically responds to the nomination of Circuit Court nominees with high elevation estimates. The Senate takes longer to confirm nominees with high elevation scores and is less likely to confirm them by voice vote, and these nominees receive a greater share of nay votes. This paper concludes by suggesting additional uses for the elevation estimates.
Although audio archives are available for a number of political institutions, the data they provide receive scant attention from researchers. Yet, audio data offer important insights, including information about speakers’ emotional states. Using one of the largest collections of natural audio ever compiled—74,158 Congressional floor speeches—we introduce a novel measure of legislators’ emotional intensity: small changes in vocal pitch that are difficult for speakers to control. Applying our measure to MCs’ floor speeches about women, we show that female MCs speak with greater emotional intensity when talking about women as compared with both their male colleagues and their speech on other topics. Our two supplementary analyses suggest that increased vocal pitch is consistent with legislators’ broader issue commitments, and that emotionally intense speech may affect other lawmakers’ behavior. More generally, by demonstrating the utility of audio-as-data approaches, our work highlights a new way of studying political speech.
Gendered Vulnerability examines the factors that make women politicians more electorally vulnerable than their male counterparts. For instance, female candidates get less and lower quality coverage from the media; they face more and better quality political opponents; and they receive less support from their political parties. Beyond these purely electoral factors, women face persistent gender biases throughout society, which makes it more difficult for them to succeed and can also lead them to doubt their abilities and qualifications. These factors combine to convince women that they must work harder to win elections-a phenomenon that Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt term "gendered vulnerability." Since women feel constant pressure to make sure they can win reelection, they devote more of their time and energy to winning their constituents' favor. For example, women secure more federal spending for their districts and states than men do; women devote more time and energy to constituent services; women introduce more bills and resolutions; and women's policy positions are more responsive to what their voters want. Lazarus and Steigerwalt examine a dozen different facets of legislative behavior, and find that across them all, female embers simply do a better job of representing their constituents than male members. © by Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt 2018. All rights reserved.
Evidence on whether there is a gender affinity effect in US elections is mixed. In this article, we develop a theory of when gender affinity effects will be present and when they will be absent. Crucial to our theory is electoral context. In nonpartisan contexts, we argue that candidate sex serves as a representational cue and will lead to gender affinity effects in vote choice. However, in partisan contexts, all voters will use partisanship as a cue and there will be no evidence of gender affinity effects. We test and find support for our theory using data on vote choice in the 2012 U.S. state supreme court elections and a set of conjoint experiments. Our results have implications for theories of descriptive representation and the design of electoral institutions.
The negative consequences of polarization have been pointed to by scholars and politicians alike as evidence of a need for a renewal of bipartisanship. However, scholarship on bipartisanship remains limited. This article develops a theory of partisan bridging that predicts when and why certain legislators might be willing to cross the partisan aisle. I argue that personal preferences can lead some legislators to cross the aisle in search of consensus, in effect serving as “partisan bridges.” I test my theory by examining the role of Republican women in the diffusion of contraceptive coverage at the state level. Through an individual‐level analysis of sponsorship and vote choice and an aggregate‐level analysis of policy diffusion, I find that moderate Republican women at times served as critical actors in the policy process.
We examine gender bias in political institutions through a novel lens: oral arguments at the US Supreme Court. We ask whether female lawyers are afforded less speaking time during oral arguments compared to male lawyers. We posit that justices, while highly educated and more aware than most of laws requiring equal treatment, may be influenced by gender schemas that result in unconscious biased treatment of male and female lawyers. Applying automated content analysis to the transcripts of 3,583 oral arguments, we find that female lawyers are interrupted earlier, allowed to speak for less time between interruptions, and subjected to more and longer speeches by the justices compared to their male counterparts. However, this pattern is reversed during oral arguments involving gender-related cases. Our most novel and significant theoretical finding is that gender negates the well-documented positive effect of being on the winning side of a case.
Extant research on public support for judicial nominees finds that ideological congruence with the nominee is the most important factor in an individual’s decision to support a nominee. The research presented in this article develops the theory that for individuals from underrepresented groups, a shared descriptive identity with the nominee will moderate the negative effect of ideological distance. We test our theory using the nominations of Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. Furthermore, we conduct placebo tests to determine whether the effect of ideology is moderated for underrepresented groups when a shared descriptive identity is not present. We find that in the context of the Thomas nomination, a shared racial identity led to increased support for Thomas among liberal African Americans. We find similar effects in the case of Kagan and conservative women. In the case of Sotomayor, we find that a shared ethnic identity led to increased support among conservative Latinos, regardless of gender. We conclude by discussing the implications our findings have for descriptive representation and presidential selection of judicial nominees.
Ever since the Carter Administration began appointing female and minority judges in large numbers, scholars have sought to measure their impact. In this Article, I focus on a different, but equally important question: what is the background and ideology of female and minority judges and how has this changed over time? I address this issue empirically by analyzing quantitative data on United States district court judges from Presidents Lyndon Johnson through Barack Obama. My findings are twofold: First, I show that the professional and educational characteristics of female and minority judges have historically differed from those of white male judges, but these differences have narrowed over time, particularly when it comes to education. Second, I present evidence showing that, even though professional and educational differences have narrowed, female and minority judges still bring a different ideological viewpoint than do white male judges, being on average more left-leaning in their ideology. These findings reframe existing discussions about descriptive representation in the courts and suggest that female and minority judges more than ever tend to share professional and educational backgrounds with white or male judges, but still bring a different, albeit more liberal, perspective.
Scholars have long sought to resolve whether and to what degree political actor diversity influences the outputs of political institutions like legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. When it comes to the judiciary, diverse judges may greatly affect outcomes. Despite this potential, no consensus exists for whether judicial diversity affects behavior in trial courts -- i.e., the stage where the vast majority of litigants interact with the judicial branch. After addressing the research design limitations in previous trial court-diversity studies, the statistical results here indicate that a trial judge's sex and race have very large effects on his or her decision making. These results have important implications for how we view diversity throughout the judiciary and are particularly timely given the Obama Administration's nearly 200 female and minority appointments to the federal trial courts.
Scholars have analyzed how those with close ties to Supreme Court justices—including family, friends, and political and legal elites—influence judicial behavior, but there are still questions about how law clerks’ attributes affect their relationship to their justice. This is important because clerks’ genders may affect their credibility and their ability to influence their justice’s behavior when a case involves a clear gender dimension. Scholars have uncovered a great deal about the determinants and consequences of the credibility of a different set of attorneys—those who present at oral argument. I apply insights from the literature on attorney credibility to the context of law clerks and analyze whether women enjoy greater credibility and influence in cases involving sex discrimination and abortion. I find that women influence their justice’s vote on the merits, but this influence is conditional on the number of women a justice hires and the justice’s ideology. This finding is robust to accounting for potential spurious factors and to balancing covariates via matching. This analysis has implications for how the justices acquire and use information from their environment to aid in their decision making.
In order to study the political ideologies of judicial law clerks in the United States, we construct a novel dataset that combines information on the identity of clerks with a measure of political ideology based on political donations. We then use this data to empirically investigate several important questions about the ideologies of clerks. First, we examine whether clerks tend to share the liberal ideology of other lawyers or the more conservative ideology associated with federal judges and find that clerks tend to be disproportionately liberal. Second, we investigate how the ideologies of clerks compares to the ideologies of lawyers and find that liberal lawyers are more likely to have clerked than conservatives. Third, we assess whether the ideologies of clerks differs based on the level of clerkship and find that the liberal skew becomes less pronounced as the prestige of the clerkship increases. Fourth, we analyze the relationship between ideology and the hiring of clerks and find that the ideology of judges is strongly correlated with the ideology of their clerks.
Scholars have long sought to resolve whether and to what degree political actor diversity influences the outputs of political institutions like legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. When it comes to the judiciary, diverse judges may greatly affect outcomes. Despite this potential, no consensus exists for whether judicial diversity affects behavior in trial courts—that is, the stage where the vast majority of litigants interact with the judicial branch. After addressing the research design limitations in previous trial court-diversity studies, the results here indicate that a trial judge’s sex and race have very large effects on his or her decision making. These results have important implications for how we view diversity throughout the judiciary and are particularly timely given the Obama Administration’s over 200 female and minority appointments to the federal trial courts.
Women are drastically underrepresented in American political institutions. This has prompted speculation about the impact of electing more women on policy and the functioning of government. Examining the growing presence of women in Congress, I demonstrate that women do exhibit unique policy priorities, focusing more on the needs of various groups of women. However, the incentive structure of the American electoral system, which rewards ideological purity, means that women are not likely to bring more consensus to Washington. Indeed, women’s issues are now entrenched in the partisan divide. Since the 1990s, the majority of women elected to Congress have been Democrats, who have pursued their vision of women’s interests while portraying Republican policies as harmful to women. In response, Republican women have been deployed to defend their party, further reducing the potential for bipartisan cooperation.
Few decisions are so determinative of the character of a law school as the selection of its faculty. After hiring as law teachers large numbers of attorneys who have no teaching, publication, or administrative experience, law schools educate them about their new responsibilities by a method best described as "throwing them into the water" where it is to be hoped that most will swim rather than sink.
Women in public office are often assumed to "make a difference" for women, as women--in other words, to represent their female constituents better than do their male counterparts. But is sex really an accurate predictor of a legislator's political choices and actions? In this book, Beth Reingold compares the representational activities and attitudes of male and female members of the Arizona and California state legislatures to illuminate the broader implications of the election and integration of women into public office. In the process, she challenges many of the assumptions that underlie popular expectations of women and men in politics. Using in-depth interviews, survey responses, and legislative records, Reingold actually uncovers more similarities between female and male politicians than differences. Moreover, the stories she presents strongly suggest that rather than assuming that who our representatives are determines what they will do in office, we must acknowledge the possibility that the influence of gender on legislative behavior can be weakened, distorted, or accentuated by powerful forces within the social and political contexts of elective office. |This comparative study examines the behavior of male and female members of the Arizona and California state legislatures to investigate whether who our representatives are determines what they will do. Beth Reingold challenges many of the assumptions that underlie popular expectations of women and men in politics.
In How Women Represent Women: Political Parties, Gender and Representation in the State Legislatures, Tracy Osborn examines two avenues through which political parties fundamentally affect how women legislators represent women by creating women's issues policies. First, women's party identities shape the types of policy alternatives they offer to solve women's policy problems. Second, parties organize the legislative process by holding majority control, to varying degrees, over agenda setting and policy creation, promoting some women legislators' policy proposals over others. Osborn tests these two avenues of influence by comparing partisan women's legislative behavior toward the creation of women's issues policies across different party environments in the U.S. state legislatures. She uses original election, sponsorship, and roll call data in nearly all ninety-nine state legislative chambers in 1999-2000. She concludes that Republican and Democratic women offer different solutions to women's policy problems based in their party identities. Depending on which party controls the legislative process and how strongly they do so, this party control promotes one set of partisan policy alternatives over the other. Thus, political parties determine which women's issues policies become law. Ultimately, this book demonstrates how essential parties are to understanding how women elected to public office translate their interest in women's issues into substantive public policy.
Despite a growing recognition of the influence of gender in the policymaking arena, few scholars have studied the relationship between lawyer gender and decision making on appellate courts. This article examines this relationship in the context of the United States Courts of Appeals, where there have been a greater number of female judges for a longer period of time. The results of the analysis suggest that, in the average Courts of Appeals case, judges are generally more likely to side with female attorneys, even in the absence of a “women's issue.” In addition, both male and female judges are equally supportive of female lawyers even when the circuit is not particularly gender diverse. However, circuit judges are less likely to support female attorneys in cases in which the circuit reverses the lower court, indicating a notable disadvantage for female advocates in the very cases in which advocacy might be most crucial at the circuit court level.
This research develops and tests hypotheses on the citizen and candidate characteristics that moderate utilization of candidate gender for forming impressions of House candidates' ideological orientations. High candidate visibility-attained through incumbency or campaign expenditures-enhances citizens' categorization of candidates on the basis of gender to infer ideological orientation. The effects of candidate gender are conditioned by political awareness for perception of Republican candidates' ideological positions because citizens receive conflicting cues about their orientations. In contrast, the relatively easy information process task for forming an impression of a Democratic female candidate allows for categorization on the basis of gender to occur among the most and least politically sophisticated. Finally, citizens draw on stereotypes of women to assign attributes to female candidates, not on stereotypes of men to infer attributes of male candidates.
Because law clerks are integral to the work of the Supreme Court, the selection of clerks is important. Observers of the Court have referred to "feeder judges," by which we mean court of appeals judges from whom justices draw large numbers of clerks. This article analyzes the feeder-judge phenomenon in the 1976-1985 and 1995-2004 terms of the Court. It verifies that justices do rely heavily on certain court of appeals judges as sources of clerks and that justices differ considerably in the sets of feeder judges from whom they draw clerks. It also shows that there is a strong ideological element to the use of feeder judges by individual justices and that this element has strengthened over time.
We ask whether women's descriptive representation in Congress enhances women's substantive representation through speechmaking on the House floor. Much of the research on women's substantive representation has focused on members' votes for and sponsorship of “women's issues” legislation. We depart from this research by systematically analyzing how members' gender and partisan identities affect gendered rhetoric in their floor speeches. In an era marked by significant increases in the number of congresswomen and partisan polarization, understanding the interactive effect of gender and partisanship on women's representation is particularly important. In an analysis of more than 30,000 speeches from 1993 to 2008, we find that when members speak about issues of their choosing during one-minute speeches, and during specific legislative debates over the most important policies considered on the House floor, congresswomen in both parties are significantly more likely than men to discuss women, enhancing women's representation.
I develop a method to measure the ideology of candidates and contributors using campaign finance data. Combined with a dataset of over 87 million contribution records from state and federal elections, the method estimates ideal points for an expansive range of political actors. The common pool of contributors that give across institutions and levels of politics makes it possible to recover a unified set of ideological measures for members of Congress, the President and Executive Branch, state legislators, governors and other state officials, as well as the interest groups and individuals that make political donations. Since candidates fundraise regardless of incumbency status, the method estimates ideal points for both incumbents and non-incumbents. After establishing measure validity and addressing issues concerning strategic behavior, I present results for a variety of political actors and discuss several promising avenues of research made possible by the new measures.
To say that positive political theory (PPT) scholarship on the hierarchy of justice is theory rich and data poor is to make a rather uncontroversial claim. For over a decade now, scholars have offered intriguing theoretical accounts aimed at understanding why lower courts defy (comply with) higher courts. But only rarely do they subject the accounts to rigorous empirical interrogation. The chief obstacle, it seems, is the lack of a reliable and valid measurement strategy for placing judges of lower courts and justices of higher courts in the same policy space. Without such a strategy, we can systematically test few, if any, hypotheses flowing from PPT models of the judicial hierarchy. With such an approach not only can we investigate the implications of these models, we can assess many others flowing from the larger PPT program on judging, as well. It is to the challenge of scaling judges and justices (as well as legislatures and executives) that we turn in this article. We begin by explicating our measurement strategy, and then by explaining its advantages over previous efforts. Next we explore the results of our approach and provide a descriptive look at data it yields: a “Judicial Common Space” (JCS) score for all justices and judges appointed since 1953. The last section offers three applications designed to shore up the suitability and adaptability of the JCS for a range of positive projects on the courts.
This article outlines a cognitive-affective model of the role of social groups in political thinking. The model is based on the assumptions that people have stored information and emotional reactions to social groups, and that people are purposive in their thinking about social groups in the sense that they are interested in understanding what various groups have obtained and whether it is deserved. The process through which social groups influence political thinking varies significantly depending upon whether an individual identifies with the group in question. Generally, people are more inclined to feel sympathetic towards the groups to which they belong. These ideas are illustrated with an empirical analysis that focuses on women's issues and makes use of data collected in the 1984 National Election Study Pilot Study.
Scholars have pointed to signs of growing polarization in American politics along partisan and ideological lines. This article probes for polarization in the Supreme Court by examining the role of ideological considerations in the selection of law clerks. For the 1975–1998 terms of the Court, we analyzed the relationship between the justices' ideological positions and the positions of the lower court judges from whom the justices drew their clerks. We found that this relationship became stronger over the course of that period, with a sharp increase in strength during the 1990s. This finding provides one significant piece of evidence that the Court has been changing as an institution.
Despite a recent resurgence of interest in the concept of group consciousness, relatively little attention has been devoted to the political impact of group identifications. Consequently, in this paper the effects of group identification on political perception and evaluation are investigated. Theoretically, a schematic approach is adopted in outlining the perceptual effects of group identifications. Empirically, data from the 1980 National Election Study are used to test some of the hypotheses derived from this schematic approach. The results from this analysis suggest that group identifications play an important role in defining the perceptual viewpoints that people bring to bear on politics; people identifying with different groups focus on different things and evaluate political issues from different perspectives.
Many social scientists believe that dumping long lists of explanatory variables into linear regression, probit, logit, and other statistical equations will successfully “control” for the effects of auxiliary factors. Encouraged by convenient software and ever more powerful computing, researchers also believe that this conventional approach gives the true explanatory variables the best chance to emerge. The present paper argues that these beliefs are false, and that without intensive data analysis, linear regression models are likely to be inaccurate. Instead, a quite different and less mechanical research methodology is needed, one that integrates contemporary powerful statistical methods with deep substantive knowledge and classic data—analytic techniques of creative engagement with the data.