Employing a matching design on US state supreme court vacancies and replacements from 1970 to 2016, I demonstrate that patterns of judicial replacement are gendered. Vacancies made by women are filled by women at a greater rate than vacancies made by men, and vacancies made by men are filled by men at a greater rate than vacancies made by women. To examine whether these patterns of replacement have systematically suppressed or advantaged the selection of women judges, I compare judicial selections to the gender composition of lawyers. Women are selected to state supreme courts at rates that parallel the gender diversity of lawyers over time, which suggests that gendered patterns of replacement have neither advantaged nor excluded women from state supreme courts in the aggregate.

Do the processes states use to select judges for peak courts influence gender diversity? Scholars have debated whether concentrating appointment power in a single individual or diffusing appointment power across many individuals best promotes gender diversification. Others have claimed that the precise structure of the process matters less than fundamental changes in the process. We clarify these theoretical mechanisms, derive testable implications concerning the appointment of the first woman to a state’s highest court, and then develop a matched-pair research design within a Rosenbaum permutation approach to observational studies. Using a global sample beginning in 1970, we find that constitutional change to the judicial selection process decreases the time until the appointment of the first woman justice. These results reflect claims that point to institutional disruptions as critical drivers of gender diversity on important political posts.

Much attention is paid to how mechanisms for selecting political officials shape which types of officials hold positions of power, but selection procedures do not always produce the desired outcomes. In the context of the judiciary, many expected “merit” selection procedures to facilitate the selection of women justices to the bench, an expectation that has not been realized. Applying theories of procedural fairness to judicial selection procedures, I argue that observers’ beliefs that merit selection procedures are more “fair” (relative to unilateral selection procedures) makes observers more accepting of all-male benches. Survey experimental evidence demonstrates that respondents do perceive merit selection procedures as more fair than gubernatorial selection procedures, a priori. In turn, respondents are less critical of all-male courts when judges are selected through a merit selection procedure. These findings contribute to our understanding of the ways in which (1) selection institutions shape prospects for gender diversity, (2) institutional design can have unintended consequences, and (3) procedural fairness can obscure accountabilituy for suboptimal outcomes.

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a V-Dem Institute at University of Gothenburg with almost ten staff, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers (PMs), 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: AbstractIncreasing the diversity of political institutions is believed to improve the quality of political discourse and, subsequently, the quality of political outcomes. Moreover, the presence of diverse officials in positions of power signals the openness and fairness of political institutions. These benefits of diversity should be particularly acute in the judiciary, where judges are tasked with the symbolically and substantively powerful duty of interpreting and defending constitutional values. Extant scholarship suggests that well-designed appointment process can promote diversity without explicitly gendered goals, much less quotas. If correct, these proposals raise the possibility of promoting greater diversity without having to resolve politically charged debates about quotas. Yet, scholars disagree about the effects of particular design choices. Worse, estimating causal effects of institutions in observational data is particularly difficult. We develop a research design linked to the empirical implications of existing theoretical arguments to evaluate the effect of institutional change on the gender diversity of peak courts cross-nationally. Specifically, we consider the effect of an increase (or a decrease) in the number of actors involved in the appointment process. We find mixed results for any existing claim about the role of appointment institutions play in increasing diversity. Yet we also find that any institutional change seems to cause an increase in the gender diversity of peak courts. The world's peak courts, by which we refer to high ordinary courts or constitutional courts, are increasingly staffed by women (Hoekstra, 2010;Hoekstra, Kittilson and Bond, 2014;Turquet, 2011). Within the last decade, gender parity or near parity has been reached on the national high courts of Angola, Australia, Canada, Ecuador, Rwanda, Serbia, and Slovenia. Women are increasingly serving as presidents of prestigious courts known internationally for their innovative jurisprudence, including the Supreme Courts of Canada and Israel as well as the Constitutional Chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court. This pattern is notable for a number of reasons. The presence of more women on peak courts may influence the law, and by implication, core matters of public policy, either because women understand the law in particular contexts or evaluate facts differently than men (e.g. Boyd, Epstein and Martin, 2010;Glynn and S...

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