Career incentives and judicial independence: Evidence from the Indian lower judiciary

Historically, the debate on judicial independence has been centered on whether the participation of external branches in the appointment process of judges hampers the impartial administration of justice. However, less attention has been given to how the internal judicial organization shapes the judge’s decision. This paper, which focuses on the Indian lower judiciary, explores whether the prospects of promotion to higher courts result in currying favor with judicial leaders who possess discretionary power over personnel matters within the judicial organization. For this purpose, I exploit natural experiments: female judicial leader’s appointments replacing male incumbents, causing the unpredictable shift of gender preferences in personnel evaluation of local judges. Then, I use the triple difference strategy exploiting the high-court level variation on whether it has at least one female judicial leader, the individual judge level variation on the eligibility as the high court judge, and the temporal variation pre- and post-female judicial leader’s appointment. Estimation results show that eligible judges pander to female leaders and hand down lenient sentences on female parties. Evidence suggests that discretionary appointments of judges through the non-transparent “judges-selecting-judges” system can be detrimental to the independent administration of justice. Therefore, careful institutional design is necessary to balance judicial accountability and independence.