Do Judges’ Characteristics Matter? Ethnicity, Gender, and Partisanship in Texas State Trial Courts

Abstract

We explore how government officials’ behavior varies with their ethnicity, gender, and political orientation. Specifically, we analyze criminal sentencing decisions in Texas state district courts using data on approximately half a million criminal cases from 2004 to 2013. We exploit randomized case assignments within counties and obtain precisely estimated effects of judges’ ethnicity, gender, and political orientation that are near zero, conditional on geographic factors. However, we find substantial cross-judge heterogeneity in sentencing. Exploiting a unique overlapping structure of Texas state district courts, we find no evidence that this heterogeneity is driven by judges pandering to voters.