Replication Data for: Ascriptive Characteristics and Perceptions of Impropriety in the Rule of Law: Race, Gender, and Public Assessments of Whether Judges Can Be Impartial

Perceptions of procedural fairness influence the legitimacy of the law, and because procedures are mutable, reforming them can buttress support for the rule of law. Yet legal authorities have recently faced a distinct challenge: accusations of impropriety based on their ascriptive characteristics (e.g., gender, ethnicity). We study the effect of these traits in the context of the U.S. legal system, focusing on the conditions under which citizens perceive female and minority judges as exhibiting impropriety, and how this compares with perceptions of their white and male counterparts. We find that Americans use a judge’s race and gender to make inferences about which groups the judge favors, whether she is inherently biased, and whether she should recuse. Notably, we find drastically different evaluations of female and Hispanic judges among the political right and left.

This dataset underwent an independent verification process that replicated the tables and figures in the primary article. For the supplementary materials, verification was performed solely for the successful execution of code. The verification process was carried out by the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. <br> The associated article has been awarded Open Materials and Open Data Badges. Learn more about the Open Practice Badges from the Center for Open Science.<br>