The Impact of Party and Region On Voting Decisions in the United States Courts of Appeals, 1955-1986

Abstract

nalysts of American political institutions have firmly established that party and region are important factors in voting behavior at both mass and elite levels of analysis. In this paper we examine the influence of party and region on the decisions of judges of the United States Courts of Appeals. Studies of voting patterns on the United States Supreme Court (Tate 1981), the federal district courts (Carp and Rowland 1983), and state appellate courts (see, for example, Ulmer 1962; Nagel 1961) have found both partisan and regional differences among judges. A number of studies of the United States Courts of Appeals have discovered significant differences in the voting patterns of Democratic and Republican judges on a wide spectrum of issues (Goldman 1966, 1975; Songer 1982; Gottschall 1983, 1986; Tomasi and Velona 1987). Such studies have found patterns that parallel the partisan differences in congressional voting: Democratic appellate judges are more likely than their Republican counterparts to support unions in labor management cases, defendants in criminal appeals, a liberal position in civil liberties cases, and the federal government in its attempts to regulate the economy. Carp and Rowland (1983) found modest regional differences between northern and southern judges on the federal district courts but they found no consistent differences between judges from the East and West. Both Democratic and Republican judges from the North were more liberal than their southern counterparts on criminal justice issues and on labor and economic management issues. The magnitude of regional differences increased substantially after 1968. For civil liberties issues, southern judges were slightly more liberal than northern judges from 1933 to 1968, but after 1968 northern judges in both parties became substantially more liberal than southern judges. More recently, Wenner and Dutter (1989) discovered significant differences for both the federal district and appeals courts among some of the circuits on environmental cases. However, the differences among circuits did not always follow regional lines consistently and they concluded that regional effects were more pronounced at the trial than at the appellate level.