When Issue Salience Affects Adjudication: Evidence from Swiss Asylum Appeal Decisions

Abstract

Immigration is a top concern among citizens across the globe. Research shows that the salience of immigration shapes voters' political behavior, but little is known about whether it influences judicial behavior. This article theorizes that variation in issue salience influences judges' behavior when there is a clear connection between the legal and a generally salient, politicized issue. I test this argument drawing on all Swiss asylum appeal decisions reached between 2007 and 2015. I find that higher asylum salience leads judges to decide otherwise similar asylum appeals less favorably. This effect is not restricted to judges affiliated with anti-immigrant parties, unlikely to be driven by accountability pressures, and strongest for those topics known to drive anti-immigrant sentiment in the general public. Together, these findings raise concerns that issue salience threatens the consistency of judicial decisions.

Anti-Immigrant Bias in the Choice Between Punitive and Rehabilitative Justice

“…4 This increase in anti-immigrant bias in the application of rehabilitative justice coincides with a spike in humanitarian arrivals from the Middle East and Africa during the same time period, which quickly became the most salient and divisive political issue in the German political sphere. These results mirror prior research on how judicial discrimination covaries with the issue salience of immigration over time (Emeriau 2022;Spirig 2023).…”

“…More generally, our results align with the 'bias-of-crowds' perspective: implicit bias is particularly predictive of behavior at the aggregate level, where idiosyncratic variation in the latent biases of different individuals (judges) is averaged out (Payne, Vuletich and Lundberg 2017). Similarly, we find evidence that judges are influenced by the political discourse they are embedded in (see also Emeriau 2022;Spirig 2023). In our setting, this manifests in a spike in discrimination against offenders from the Middle East and Africa since 2014/15, i.e.…”

Managing Refugee Protection Crises: Policy Lessons from Economics and Political Science

“…Immigration, and newly arriving asylum seekers especially, are one of the most salient topics in the media. Almost on a daily basis, newspapers report on asylum-related issues (see, e.g., Spirig 2021). At the same time, experiences with refugees can also take place on the micro-level.…”

Lobbying Influence -- The Role of Money, Strategies and Measurements

“…Over the past decades, the topic has gained even more practical relevance as debates around urgent policy agendas have become increasingly contested and politicized (Lupia 2013;Bouleau 2019;Fowler and Gollust 2015;Druckman and Lupia 2017). As such, scholars have emphasized the importance of investigating the politics-especially the working of lobbying-behind policymaking, for instance, in migration (Spirig 2021), climate change (Stokes 2016;Goldberg et al 2020;Farrell 2016;Kim et al 2016;Cory et al 2021), energy system transitions (Stutzer et al 2021;Hughes et al 2020;Duygan et al 2021), and public health (Bowers and Cohen 2018;Wouters 2020;Harris and Moss 2021). Inspecting what it means for competing stakeholders to be politically influential and how the distribution of influence is linked to their endowments as well as lobbying practices thus leads to a better understanding of the nature of political contestations.…”