Working Paper: NBER ID: w21145
Authors: Shamena Anwar; Patrick Bayer; Randi Hjalmarsson
Abstract: This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed nämndemän) to make three contributions to the literature on jury decision-making: (i) an assessment of whether systematic biases exist in the Swedish nämndemän system, (ii) causal evidence on the impact of juror political party on verdicts, and (iii) an empirical examination of the role of peer effects in jury decision-making. The results reveal a number of systematic biases: convictions for young defendants and those with distinctly Arabic sounding names increase substantially when they are randomly assigned jurors from the far-right (nationalist) Swedish Democrat party, while convictions in cases with a female victim increase markedly when they are assigned jurors from the far-left (feminist) Vänster party. The results also indicate the presence of peer effects, with jurors from both the far-left and far-right parties drawing the votes of their more centrist peers towards their positions. Peer effects take the form of both sway effects, where jurors influence the opinions of their closest peers in a way that can impact trial outcomes, and dissent aversion, where jurors switch non-pivotal votes so that the decision is unanimous.
Keywords: jury decision-making; political ideology; Sweden; nmndemn system; peer effects
JEL Codes: K0; K14; K4
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| far-left and far-right jurors (K40) | influence on votes of centrist peers (D72) |
| Vnster jurors (K40) | sway effects on peer jurors (C92) |
| Swedish Democrats (J79) | negligible sway effects on peer jurors (C92) |
| Swedish Democrat juror (J79) | likelihood of conviction for defendants with Arabic names (K42) |
| Vnster juror (K16) | likelihood of conviction for cases with female victims (K14) |