The Politics of Selecting the Bench from the Bar: The Legal Profession and Partisan Incentives to Introduce Ideology Into Judicial Selection∗

Using a new dataset capturing the ideological positioning of nearly half a million U.S. judges and lawyers, we present evidence showing how ideology affects the selection of judges across federal and state judiciaries. We document that the higher the court, the more it deviates ideologically from the ideology of attorneys, suggesting ideology plays a strong role in judicial selection. We also show ideology plays stronger roles in jurisdictions where judges are selected via political appointments or partisan elections. Our findings suggest that ideology is an important component of judicial selection primarily where (1) using ideology leads to expected benefits to politicians, (2) when the jurisdiction’s selection process allows ideology to be used, and (3) where it concerns the most important courts. The study is the first to provide a direct ideological comparison across judicial tiers and between judges and lawyers and to explain how and why American courts become politicized. ∗Many thanks to Matt Baum, Matt Blackwell, Tom Clark, Brian Fitzpatrick, Justin Grimmer, Jeffry Frieden, Andy Hall, Jeff Jenkins, Jonathan Nash, Michael Peress, Jenny Shen, Ken Shepsle, and Arthur Spirling for helpful feedback. We are also grateful to conference or seminar participants at Chicago, Georgetown, Harvard, MIT, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, and the Society for Political Methodology annual conference. †Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, 307 Encina West, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305 ([email protected], http://web.stanford.edu/~bonica). ‡Associate Professor, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138 ([email protected], http://scholar.harvard.edu/msen).