Replication data for: Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Alma Cohen; Crystal S. Yang

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Project Citation:

Cohen, Alma, and Yang, Crystal S. Replication data for: Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2019. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2019-10-13. https://doi.org/10.3886/E114718V1

Project Description

Summary: This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to 3.0 more months than similar nonblacks and female defendants to 2.0 fewer months than similar males compared to Democratic-appointed judges, 65 percent of the baseline racial sentence gap and 17 percent of the baseline gender sentence gap, respectively. These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics and grow substantially larger when judges are granted more discretion.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: Sentencing; Criminal Justice System; Judges

JEL Classification:
      D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
      J15 Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
      J16 Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
      K41 Litigation Process
      K42 Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law

Geographic Coverage: United States

Time Period(s): 1/1999 – 1/2015

Data Type(s): administrative records data

Methodology

Unit(s) of Observation: Defendant-Case,

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Published Versions

V1 [2019-10-13]

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Dublin Core

DDI 2.5

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