A high quality, large-scale research paper out of a highly prestigious economics journal, the American Economics Journal: Economic Policy, shows that Republican-appointed federal judges exacerbate racial and gender sentencing disparities. This finding is perhaps not surprising given that previous research from leading economic journals have shown racist attitudes redefined America’s modern party coalitions and that even Republican professors exhibit severe race-biased grading patterns.
What’s extraordinarily notable about this study, however, is that it’s based on randomly assigned cases. That matters because social sciences often struggle with omitted variable bias (i.e. the idea that correlation is not causation). Under a large random-control trial, omitted variable bias is reduced to zero, which means we can directly interpret the difference in sentencing as the “effect of appointing a Republican judge on sentencing outcomes”.
So, what are the effects? Nearly a two thirds increase over the baseline of racial bias in federal sentencing can be causally linked to Republican-appointed judges, which means that electing Democrats to judicial positions and executive offices that appoint judges is a massive part of the battle for criminal justice reform. We should be extraordinarily skeptical of judges who are registered Republicans or Republican-appointed. This has been a serious issue at the state and local level, where Democratic voters are often willing to crossover and support Republican judges because they view the judicial branch as non-partisan. It isn’t.
If you believe that our court system should judge cases on the merits, you should vote for progressive judges. If you believe in restorative justice, you should vote for Democrats up and down the ballot. If you believe that defendants should be judged on their actions instead of their ascriptive identity, your votes for prosecutors and executive offices should reflect it. Putting Democrats in office won’t end all racial disparities, but as this paper shows it makes a massive difference.
“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.”
-Coauthors Alma Cohen and Crystal S. Yang in “Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions” (AEJ: Economic Policy, 2019)