Diverse and Inclusive High Courts: A Global and Intersectional Perspective

Critical race feminists call attention to the ways in which multiple and overlapping forms of privilege and discrimination shape individual experiences and perspectives. In this article, we argue that judiciaries cannot be fully inclusive if their composition does not reflect a society’s intersecting sources of disadvantage. We consider intersectional inclusion on high courts from a compar-ative perspective. Most existing practices of representation on high courts promote the inclusion of groups as if they are internally homogenous. We explore the attempts at and successes of promoting intersectional inclusion in the context of the high courts of Canada and South Africa. Although the inclusion of marginalized subgroups such as black women has not been automatic in South Africa, its progress is further along than Canada in promoting intersectional diversity on the highest court

Breaking the Judicial Glass Ceiling: The Appointment of Women to High Courts Worldwide

The salience of judicial institutions in democratic and nondemocratic countries has increased, making it important to have women on these powerful and visible decision-making bodies. Yet, women have only recently gained entrance to peak judicial bodies including constitutional and supreme courts. The appointment of the first woman to a high court is a historic landmark, breaking traditional ideas of who can and should be on the court. Using a global, longitudinal data set we show that certain explanatory factors matter differently in wealthy, stable democracies and in developing countries. The method of selecting high court justices exerts influence in wealthy, stable democracies but not newer ones. Further, our findings suggest that in both sets of countries, appointments to high courts are not made in a domestic vacuum and are influenced by international norms of having women participate in governing institutions

CCES 2016, Team Module of Arizona State University (ASU)

This dataverse contains the data and supporting documents for the CCES 2016 Arizona State University. This project was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant Number SES-1559125

Just the Facts? Media Coverage of Female and Male High Court Appointees in Five Democracies

In this article, we examine gender differences in news media portrayals of nominees to high courts and whether those differences vary across country and time. Although past research has examined gender differences in news media coverage of candidates for elective office, few studies have looked at media coverage of high court nominees. As women are increasingly nominated to courts around the world, it is important to examine how nominations are covered by the news media and whether there is significant variation in coverage based on gender. We analyze media coverage of high court justices in five democracies: Argentina, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States. We compare coverage of women appointed to the highest court with coverage of the most temporally proximate male nominees. We also compare coverage over time within each country as well as between countries that nominated women early with those that did so more recently. We find some evidence of gendered coverage, especially with regard to the attention paid to the gender of the women appointees