Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Political Science
This dissertation seeks to determine if, and to what extent, federal judges behave in a partisan manner when deciding politically salient election law cases. Specifically, do judges favor the interests of their political party, after controlling for judicial policy preferences? The main hypothesis that I seek to test is the relationship between case votes and the interests of a judge's political party in a given election law case. I posit that when the judge's political party benefits from a ruling for the plaintiff/defendant, a judge will be more likely to rule for the plaintiff/defendant. I also test four additional hypotheses, all of which should moderate the relationship between partisan interests and case votes. I test the effects of political career experience, age, court of appeals membership, and partisan panel composition on the likelihood of a judge ruling in favor of her political party.
To test these hypotheses, I model the case votes of federal district court and court of appeals judges in campaign finance, political party right to association, and redistricting cases from 1962 through 2007. To control for a judge's policy preferences, I impute first and second dimension common space scores for all federal judges in my dataset. Of the three categories of election law cases examined in this dissertation, only the campaign finance models consistently produce a statistically significant partisanship effect. There is also evidence of a conditional partisanship effect in redistricting cases, which is contingent on the partisan composition of a three-judge district court. Additionally, judicial policy preferences are statistically significant predictors of judicial behavior in political party right to association and redistricting cases, and campaign finance cases that do not involve the interests of the Democratic and Republican Parties. While most political science models of judicial behavior emphasize policy preferences or a combination of law and policy p (open full item for complete abstract)
Committee: Lawrence Baum PhD (Advisor); Gregory Caldeira PhD (Committee Member); Thomas Nelson PhD (Committee Member)
Subjects: Political Science