Do Judges Favor Their Own Ethnicity and Gender?: Evidence from Kenya

Daniel Li Chen, Jimmy Graham, Manuel Ramos Maqueda and Shashank - DIME3 Singh

No 9956, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Evidence from high-income countries suggests that judges often exhibit in-group bias, favoring litigants that share an identity with the judge. However, there is little evidence on this phenomenon from the Global South. Collecting the available universe of High Court decisions in Kenya, this paper leverages the random assignment of cases to judges to evaluate the existence of in-group bias along gender and ethnic lines. It finds that, relative to a baseline win rate of 43 percent, defendants are 4 percentage points more likely to win if they share the judge's gender and 5 percentage points more likely to win if they share the judge~^!!^s ethnicity. The paper finds that the written judgements are on average shorter and less likely to be cited when defendants who are of the same gender or ethnicity as the judge win their case. This is consistent with in-group biased decisions being of lower quality. In addition, the findings show that female defendants are less likely to win the case if the judge exhibits stereotypical or negative attitudes towards women in their writings.

Keywords: Gender and Development; Labor Markets; Inequality; Human Rights; Judicial System Reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen and nep-law
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9956

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