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Judicial Ideology in the Absence of Rights

Evidence from Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Zoë Robinson ,
Patrick Leslie  and
Jill Sheppard
Zoë Robinson*
Affiliation:
Australian National University, Australia
Patrick Leslie
Affiliation:
Australian National University, Australia
Jill Sheppard
Affiliation:
Australian National University, Australia
*
Contact the corresponding author, Zoë Robinson, at zoe.robinson@anu.edu.au.
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Fall 2022 , pp. 239 - 264
Copyright
© 2022 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Russell Smyth, Tonja Jacobi, Ken Benoit, Jana von Stein, Hans Hanpu Tong, Keith Dowding, Andrew Banfield, Gerry Rosenberg, and participants at workshops at the Taiwanese Political Science Association, the European Consortium on Political Research, the Australian Political Science Association, the Australian Political Science Association Political Organisations and Participation Standing Group, and the Australian National University. We are particularly grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. For their excellent research assistance, we thank Jonathan Tjandra, Edmund Handby, Shreeya Smith, Indira Wrigley, Andrew Ray, Julia Rheinberger, Matthew Putt, Benjamin Durkin, and Kate Johnston. We are grateful to the Registry and Library of the High Court of Australia for their assistance. Robinson thanks the Australian National University Future Fellowship Scheme for supporting her work on Australian judicial behavior. Replication materials for this article are available in the JLC Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/OMEQT2.

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