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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
On Estimating Personality Traits Of Us Supreme Court Justices, Ryan C. Black, Ryan J. Owens, Justin Wedeking, Patrick C. Wohlfarth
On Estimating Personality Traits Of Us Supreme Court Justices, Ryan C. Black, Ryan J. Owens, Justin Wedeking, Patrick C. Wohlfarth
Political Science Faculty Publications
Psychological scholarship on personality is uniting with political science to redefine existing theories. This is clearly the case with research on judicial behavior and the US Supreme Court. But if this new approach is to survive and thrive, it must employ measures equal to the task. We show that Supreme Court Individual Personality Estimates, which seek to estimate justices’ personalities by examining their concurring opinions, suffer from a number of important methodological deficits that critically limit their usefulness. We briefly discuss what kinds of improved personality measures scholars should use instead and offer an improved set of estimates for one …
Do Americans Perceive Diverse Judges As Inherently Biased, Yoshikuni Ono, Michael A. Zilis
Do Americans Perceive Diverse Judges As Inherently Biased, Yoshikuni Ono, Michael A. Zilis
Political Science Faculty Publications
Although women and minorities hold an increasing share of judgships in the United States, they remain underrepresented. We explore Americans’ perceptions of the bias of women and minority judges – one of the possible challenges to creating a diverse bench. We argue that prejudice against these groups manifests in a subtle way, in the belief that diverse judges cannot fairly adjudicate controversies that involve their ingroup. To test our theory, we use a list experiment specifically developed to minimize social desirability effects. We find that many respondents rate female and Hispanic judges to be biased decision makers. Our results highlight …