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The Differential Effect of War on Liberal and Conservative Judges on the US Courts of Appeals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Susanne Schorpp  and
Rebecca Reid
Susanne Schorpp*
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
Rebecca Reid
Affiliation:
University of Texas at El Paso
*
Contact the corresponding author at sschorpp@gsu.edu.
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Abstract

Recent research reveals judicial tendencies to decide cases more conservatively during times of war. Building on studies in political psychology, we use the observed movement in favor of increased security versus liberty in times of war on the courts to investigate differences in how liberals and conservatives are motivated by threat concerns. We find that war mainly conditions decision making by liberal judges in criminal and civil liberties cases. The results furthermore suggest that ideological differences play little role in wartime decision making for civil liberties cases.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Spring 2017 , pp. 1 - 31
Copyright
© 2017 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Donald Songer for his guidance, and we would like to thank Amy Steigerwalt, David Klein, and the anonymous reviewers for providing insightful comments and feedback. Replication data are available at the JLC Dataverse (http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TB0H02).

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