Political Ideology and Judicial Administration: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

We investigate whether political ideology affects the administration of the judiciary in an area with strong political valiance: setting courthouse policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so using novel data on judicial orders and a new identification strategy that leverages three features of the federal judiciary: many states have multiple judicial districts, many districts have courthouses in multiple cities, and randomness in the partisan affiliation of the chief judges from the rules governing the appointment of a chief in a district. Our research design isolates the effect of chief ideology using placebo tests that difference out unobserved district-level effects from the effects of the ideology of the actual chief judge. We find strong evidence that political ideology influenced management of the judiciary during the pandemic: Republican-appointed chief judges were less likely to require masks to be worn but more likely to suspend in-person trials.

Keywords: Judicial Politics, Judicial Behavior, Federal Courts, Political Ideology, COVID-19