Outcomes and Precedents

Abstract: We test the hypothesis that a political majority addresses the concerns of the political minority on a three-judge panel. The hypothesis suggests that the ideological content of written opinions varies with the ideological make up of the presiding panel. We test whether this is reflected in the precedents cited in U.S. Court of Appeals decisions using a unique dataset of federal appellate opinions from 1971-2007 of every citation to United States Supreme Court decisions from 1953-2007. The results provide strong evidence that judicial ideology influences how judges cite precedent in our universe of cases. Panels cite more conservative precedent as the number of Republican-appointed judges on the panel increase. When we focus, however, on a subset of “political” cases where the outcome is correlated with the panel composition, we find very little evidence of moderation in the ideological content of written opinions.