Judges Without Attributes? The Political Economy of Detention of Deportable Non-Citizens

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide an explanation of the variation in pre-removal non-citizen detention decisions by lower-court investigating judges under a civil-law system. To do so, we combine the attitudinal and strategic models of judicial behavior, arguing that given the structure of career incentives among lower-court judges, the role of policy preferences depend on the strength of such incentives. Using a natural experiment, this model allows to estimate the effect of individual-level policy preferences and career incentives on decisions regarding the detention of non-citizens before they are deported. Futhermore, it also allows for the integration of the informational cues that previous research had observed to influence such decisions. We find that policy preferences make a difference in the chances of a judge sending non-citizens to a detention center, and that this effect peaks when judges have lower incentives to comply with the official policy on detention. We also find that female judges are more sensitive to the effects of career pressure (and therefore to policy preferences) than male judges.

Keywords: attitudinal model, strategic model, detention, immigration, civil-law system