Judicial Ideology in the Absence of Rights

Abstract

Research on judicial behavior has yet to systematically examine the extent to which ideology affects voting behavior outside of rights-based issues. This study explores the predictive effect of judicial ideology on judicial votes in a country without a bill of rights: Australia. We develop an ex ante measure of judicial ideology and use original data on every Australian High Court decision between 1995 and 2019 to test whether, and in which types of cases, votes of Australia’s justices align with their ideology. The results show that ex ante ideology is predictive of voting behavior, regardless of policy area.