Estimating Preferences of Circuit Judges: A Model of Consensus Voting
提出一个共识投票模型来估计联邦巡回法院法官的偏好，该模型考虑了异议成本，在庇护案件数据上比传统真诚投票模型拟合更好，并发现合议庭组成对案件结果影响很大。
This paper develops a consensus voting model for estimating preferences of federal circuit court judges. Unlike standard ideal point models, which assume that judges vote sincerely for their preferred outcomes, the consensus model accounts for the norm of consensus in the courts of appeals by including a cost of dissent in the judicial utility function. A test of the consensus voting model on a data set of asylum appeals demonstrates that it provides a substantially better fit than a comparable sincere voting model and also generates more accurate predictions of voting probabilities. The model generates credible estimates of the impact of panel composition on case outcomes, which is surprisingly large in the asylum cases. Even though 95 percent of these decisions were unanimous, roughly half of the cases could have been decided differently if assigned to different panels.