This article assesses how the institutional context of decision making on three-judge panels of the federal Court of Appeals affects the impact that gender and race have on judicial decisions. Our central question is whether and how racial minority and women judges influence legal policy on issues thought to be of particular concern to women and minorities when serving on appellate panels which decide cases by majority rule. Proper analysis of this question requires investigating whether women and minority judges influence the decisions of other panel members. We find that the norm of unanimity on panels grants women influence over outcomes even when they are outnumbered on a panel.

In this article, we will probe two distinct historical questions. First, we explore why congressional representatives from the South, who had generally supported the Democratic Party on labor issues during the 1930s, joined with Republicans to oppose the party's pro-labor orientation in the 1940s. We also examine why the class-based union movement that mobilized so assertively after the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 became so cramped and pragmatic by the early 1950s. These puzzles, we believe, are closely related. Our explanation for why labor's horizons, topography, and prospects constricted to workplace issues, to some segments of the working population, and to limited geographic areas by the end of the Truman years points to how southern Democrats shaped the main institutions produced by New Deal and Fair Deal labor legislation.

We investigate institutional explanations for Congress's choice to fragment statutory frameworks for policy implementation. We argue that divided party government, which fuels legislative-executive conflict over control of the bureaucracy, motivates Congress to fragment implementation power as a strategy to enhance its control over implementation. We develop a novel measure of fragmentation in policy implementation, collect data on it over the period , and test hypotheses linking separation-of-powers structures to legislative design of fragmented implementation power. We find that divided party government is powerfully associated with fragmentation in policy implementation, and that this association contributed to the long-run growth of fragmentation in the postwar United States. We further find that legislative coalitions are more likely to fragment implementation power in the face of greater uncertainty about remaining in the majority.

This article investigates causes of the legislative choice to mobilize private litigants to enforce statutes. It specifies the statutory mechanism, grounded in economic incentives, that Congress uses to do so, and presents a theoretical framework for understanding how certain characteristics of separation of powers structures, particularly conflict between Congress and the president over control of the bureaucracy, drive legislative production of this mechanism. Using new and original historical data, the article presents the first empirical model of the legislative choice to mobilize private litigants, covering the years 1887 to 2004. The findings provide robust support for the proposition that interbranch conflict between Congress and the president is a powerful cause of congressional enactment of incentives to mobilize private litigants. Higher risk of electoral losses by the majority party, Democratic control of Congress, and demand by issue oriented interest groups are also significant predictors of congressional enactment of such incentives. Higher levels of risk of electoral losses by the majority party, Democratic control of Congress, and demand by issue oriented interest groups are also significant predictors of congressional enactment of such incentives.

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