Refugee Roulette Revisited: Judicial Preference Variation and Aggregation on the Swiss Federal Administrative Court 2007-2012

25 Pages Posted: 11 Jul 2015 Last revised: 2 Nov 2016

See all articles by Dominik Hangartner

Dominik Hangartner

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE); Stanford - Zurich Immigration Policy Lab; Public Policy Group

Benjamin E. Lauderdale

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE)

Judith Spirig

University of Zurich - Institute for Political Science

Date Written: February 8, 2016

Abstract

Recent studies of asylum adjudication in several Western countries have found size- able disparities between individual adjudicators. We contribute to this literature by exploiting a natural experiment from Switzerland, where all asylum appeals are handled by the Federal Administrative Court. Several features of the Swiss asylum appeal process conspire to offer an unusual opportunity to examine judges’ revealed preferences and how they correlate with their party affiliation. First, the asylum cases have a common, uni-dimensional structure, as all decisions typically involve the appeal of an initial asylum decision. Second, the cases are assigned at random (conditional on language) to panels of judges, each of whom has a known party affiliation. As a result, we can test which of several decision- and game- theoretic theories of group decision-making seem to best fit the panel decisions as well as inferring the judges’ individual preferences. We show that inconsistencies in decision-making due to panel composition were substantially reduced between 2007 and 2012, primarily because judges affiliated with the most liberal party converged towards the rest of the court.

Suggested Citation

Hangartner, Dominik and Lauderdale, Benjamin E. and Spirig, Judith, Refugee Roulette Revisited: Judicial Preference Variation and Aggregation on the Swiss Federal Administrative Court 2007-2012 (February 8, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2629290

Dominik Hangartner (Contact Author)

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) ( email )

Departments of Government and Methodology
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom

Stanford - Zurich Immigration Policy Lab

30 Alta Road
Stanford, CA 94305
United States

Public Policy Group ( email )

Rämistrasse 101
ZUE F7
Zürich, 8092
Switzerland

Benjamin E. Lauderdale

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) ( email )

Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom

Judith Spirig

University of Zurich - Institute for Political Science ( email )

Department of Political Science
Affolternstrasse 56
CH-8050 Zurich
Switzerland

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