Identifying Judicial Empathy: Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women's Issues?

In this article, we consider whether personal relationships can affect the way that judges decide cases. To do so, we leverage the natural experiment of a child's gender to identify the effect of having daughters on the votes of judges. Using new data on the family lives of U.S. Courts of Appea...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inAmerican journal of political science Vol. 59; no. 1; pp. 37 - 54
Main Authors Glynn, Adam N., Sen, Maya
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.01.2015
Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
Subjects
Appellate courts
Children
Clothing Industry
Courts
Daughters
Empathy
Employment discrimination
Experiments
Females
Feminism
Gender
Gender discrimination
Interpersonal relations
Judges
Judges & magistrates
Judicial discretion
Liberalism
Parents & parenting
Personal experiences
Republicanism
Robustness
Sex
Sons
Textile Industry
U.S.A
Votes
Voting
Voting Behavior
Women
Women's issues
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN0092-5853
1540-5907
DOI10.1111/ajps.12118

Cover

More Information
Summary:In this article, we consider whether personal relationships can affect the way that judges decide cases. To do so, we leverage the natural experiment of a child's gender to identify the effect of having daughters on the votes of judges. Using new data on the family lives of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges, we find that, conditional on the number of children a judge has, judges with daughters consistently vote in a more feminist fashion on gender issues than judges who have only sons. This result survives a number of robustness tests and appears to be driven primarily by Republican judges. More broadly, this result demonstrates that personal experiences influence how judges make decisions, and this is the first article to show that empathy may indeed be a component in how judges decide cases.
Bibliography:ArticleID:AJPS12118
istex:938A2B354ED6510BE0315304F664F918A4B1C554
ark:/67375/WNG-DXS4PB48-W
Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University
We thank Matthew Blackwell, Tom Clark, David Gelman, Jennifer Hochschild, Gary King, Jeff Lax, and Kevin Quinn for helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to seminar or conference participants at the Harvard Department of Government, the Harvard Kennedy School, Duke Law School, the University of Rochester Political Science Department, and the 2011 MPSA, 2011 EPSA, and 2012 Political Economy & Public Law meetings. Special thanks to Alex Crabill, Melissa Niedrich, and Michelle Pearse for research support. This research was supported by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Replication files are available in the AJPS Data Archive on Dataverse
http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/ajps
.
ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
content type line 23
ISSN:0092-5853
1540-5907
DOI:10.1111/ajps.12118