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Descriptive Gender Representation and Legitimacy in U.S. Trial Courts

ABSTRACT Do individuals ascribe greater legitimacy to decisions made by judges from their same demographic group? It is well established that the judiciary in the U.S. political system enjoys a much higher degree of institutional legitimacy than the other branches of government. However, far less attention has been paid to the intersection of descriptive representation and legitimacy in the courts. This article contributes to the extant literature by examining the direct influence of gender on legitimacy at the trial court level. I address the research question by conducting an experiment that allows me to isolate the effect that gender has on legitimacy. By varying the gender of the judge in a gender-neutral case, I can examine the direct effect of descriptive representation on male and female respondents. Adding a treatment with a case involving a woman's issue allows me to examine how descriptive representation effects might be moderated by case details. Surprisingly, I find that descriptive representation does not affect judicial legitimacy. Rather, I find that the direction in which a judge of any gender decides a case has a greater impact on judicial legitimacy. Implications for the theory of descriptive representation in the judiciary are discussed.