Question

Discuss the influence of partisanship and ideology on judicial decision making. How are personal beliefs translated into policy decisions? How can legal reasoning be used to justify a decision based on personal ideology? What is the relationship between political bias (liberal or conservative) and judicial activism or restraint?

Be sure to use FACTS, not opinions, to support your arguments and cite your sources.

Answer 1

PARTISANSHIP:

Simple meaning : prejudice in favour of a particular cause.

A partisan is a committed member of a political party or army. In multi-party systems, the term is used for politicians who strongly support their party's policies and are reluctant to compromise with their political opponents. A political partisan is not to be confused with a military partisan.

INFLUENCE OF PARTISANSHIP :

Redistricting cases offer a unique opportunity to test the effects of partisan favoritism in judging and to investigate when partisanship might influence decision making distinctly from ideology.

In an analysis of federal district court cases from 1981 to 2007, this study finds that federal judges are neither neutral arbiters nor crass partisans. Instead, judging in redistricting cases can best be described in terms of constrained partisanship. When redistricting law is clear, judges eschew decision making that furthers their party’s interests. However, where legal precedent is ambiguous, partisan favoritism exacts a strong influence on judicial behavior.

PEROSNAL BELIEF AND POLITICS :

We then examine the interaction between beliefs and politics: can national elections and legislative votes be expected to result in unbiased collective decisions, do heterogeneous beliefs induce strategic political actors to alter their policy choices, and how do experts and lobby groups affect the information available to policymakers? We conclude by suggesting that the relationship between beliefs and policy choices is a relatively neglected aspect of the theory of environmental regulation, and a fruitful area for further research.

BIAS AND JUDICIAL DESICIONS :

The literature on the relationship between ideology (or partisanship) and judicial decision mak-
ing is long-standing and dates to early law school–based debates about the nature and purpose of
judicial decision making. Most subsequent research within political science has taken the strong
influence of ideology on decision making as a given and looked for ways to measure ideology ac-
curately. Importantly, most of the literature in this area does not frame the importance of ideology
in decision making as bias; rather, judges here are maximizing over preferences in much the same
way that other political decision makers are but subject to a different set of constraints.