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ABSTRACT
Previous research on differences in male and female leadership attribute consensus formation to female leadership styles. However, I argue that consensus in the context of chief justice leadership is more akin to male forms of leadership. Proceeding from Meier and O’Toole’s theory of public management, I argue in this article that female chief justices should value consensus less than other duties and responsibilities. I test hypotheses using a survey of current and former state high court justices. The results show that female justices greatly devalue consensus and are more likely to place importance on interactions with state legislatures.
Notes
1. This reference list is by no means exclusive. There is an incredible amount of research on this subject across a variety of disciplines, including political science, sociology, psychology, business administration, public administration, organizational management, and leadership studies, among others.
2. Unified state court systems attempt to bring all state courts under one organizational “roof” in order to achieve greater judicial consistency and efficiency. The process of unification often involves consolidating various courts into a single type of court across the state, which simplifies the organizational structure of the state court system. The state chief justice is regularly chosen to lead and administer these court systems. The distinction between unified and non-unified court systems is important for this study because organizationally, unified court systems are more hierarchical and rigid than are non-unified court systems. See Raftery (Citation2013) for a good analysis of unified court systems.
3. It needs to be noted that none of the research examining male and female leadership states that there are essential differences in how men and women lead. Male leaders may exhibit female leadership traits, and vice versa. There is a consensus in the literature that, while these differences are not absolute, men and women in leadership sometimes act as if they are – especially if there are implicit or explicit gender role expectations for leaders in particular organizations (Eagly and Johannesen-Schmidt Citation2001; Eagly and Johnson Citation1990). This article eschews any analysis of whether the predictions of role expectations theory are or are not correct.
4. While there is a robust literature on gender and consensus formation in political contexts, there is also literature supporting the claim that female judges will readily dissent in decisions that may affect women as a group. See Szmer, Christensen, and Kaheny (Citation2015).
5. M1 and M2 are not mutually exclusive. Managers can pursue both managerial objectives simultaneously.
6. These activities can be used to both exploit an organization’s environment or to buffer the organization from environmental shocks. This distinction is unimportant for this analysis, however.
7. See Meier and O’Toole (Citation2001), Meier and O’Toole (Citation2003) for comprehensive bibliographies on this subject. The number of research projects in this vein is too broad to comprehensively cite here.
8. This analysis includes analyses of all justices regardless of whether they served as a state chief justice or not. Although several of the respondents have not served as chief justice, these justices all believed they were in a position to understand what their chief justice does or does not need to do in order to be effective at their job. This is acceptable, as Eagly and Johannesen-Schmidt (Citation2001) note that men and women internalize the needs of official roles (like the role of chief justice) and the expected gender roles of that position – if any – beforehand.
9. This response rate is in line with other surveys of state supreme court justices. See Savchak and Edwards (Citation2016) and Swanson (Citation2007).
10. Information on the distribution of chief justices surveyed across these states is excluded from this table and other tables in order to preserve justice confidentiality.
11. The earlier responses of state justices are responses to this last question.
12. Almost all of the answers to this question were straightforward. Given how the question was asked, almost all of the respondents provided simple, bullet-pointed answers to the question. While some respondents provided only one or two answers to the question, most provided three.
13. The two survey administrators determined the different categories by first identifying what they were. The eleven categories listed in are the categories determined by the administrators. The administrators then classified each response to the question “In your opinion, what are the three most important duties/responsibilities of being your court’s chief justice?” into each of the eleven categories. Coding most of the answers was straightforward. Most of the survey responses were categorized the same by the administrators (r = 0.92). The administrators worked together to classify the few responses that were coded differently by each administrator. All differences were in categories that are subsumed in the “administration” alternative and should not substantially affect the results of this analysis.
14. A Wald test for combining alternatives shows that these eight groups are not statistically distinguishable from one another, and it should be acceptable to collapse these alternatives into a single alternative.
15. I also performed an analysis where I measured chief justice as a dichotomous variable, where justices who also served as chief justices were coded as 1 and those who have or had not served as chief were coded as 0. The results were not much different, and the model fit (as measured through the Bayesian Information Criterion) was better for the models presented here. There are also theoretical reasons to include the number of years as chief justice in the model rather than a dichotomous variable of chief justice service. In their analysis of the Chief Justice’s effect on consensus on the United States Supreme Court, Ura and Flink (Citation2016) find Chief Justices become better at generating consensus the longer they serve as Chief Justice.
16. This classification scheme is based on Langer et al.’s (Citation2003) theory of state justice goals and the power of chief justice opinion assignment. They found that justices on courts where justices choose their chief justice, and where the chief justice has opinion assignment, are more likely to pursue personal goals. They are more likely to pursue institutional goals when the chief justices do not assign opinions. Here, I exclude peer/assignment from the analysis, based on the theoretical assumption that there will be more dissent on courts where justices pursue personal goals rather than institutional goals.
17. This data was gathered from the National Center for State Courts (NCSC).
18. Factors like whether a state has an intermediate appellate court are included in the Squire Index. However, there is not a strong relationship between the Squire Index and whether a state has an appellate court in this model (r = 0.26).
19. It could be that those states with intermediate appellate courts favor administration over legislative interaction because those states have discretionary dockets, and their chief justices have to preside over the case selection stage, as well as case decisions on the merits. This should be explored in future research.
20. Bracketed numbers represent 95% confidence intervals.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mikel Norris
Mikel Norris is an associate professor and associate chair of political science at Coastal Carolina University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee in 2012. His research interests include judicial selection and gender diversity on state and federal courts. He is also interested in studying political efficacy and the causes and effects of income inequality in the United States.