American Journal of Political Science
Race, gender, and party in EEOC cases, 1996–2006: Assessing the role of judge attributes in case outcomes in the US district courts
2026-01-31
We study the relationship between trial judge attributes and monetary outcomes in cases brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We define an estimand, the average feature comparison (AFC), that addresses whether or not a case outcome would differ were it assigned to a judge of one type as opposed to another—here male versus female, White versus non‐White, or Republican versus Democratic appointee. We develop a framework for estimating the AFC that takes into consideration which judges are eligible to be randomly assigned to given cases. We find the probability a case results in nonzero relief is greater if that case were assigned to a non‐White judge than to a White judge, but the relief amount is not. For gender (party), we do not find evidence that the monetary outcome of a case would be different if it was assigned to a male (Democrat) rather than a female (Republican) judge.