Working Paper: NBER ID: w24615
Authors: Alma Cohen; Crystal Yang
Abstract: 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 non-blacks 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.
Keywords: judicial politics; sentencing disparities; racial disparities; gender disparities; political affiliation
JEL Codes: H1; J15; J71; K0; K14
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| prosecutorial discretion (K40) | sentencing disparities by political affiliation (D72) |
| judge political affiliation (D72) | sentencing disparities for black defendants (K42) |
| judge political affiliation (D72) | sentencing disparities for female defendants (J16) |
| judge political affiliation (D72) | sentencing disparities (K40) |
| discretion granted to judges (K40) | sentencing disparities (K40) |