This paper uses two new datasets to investigate the reliance by political actors on the external vetting of judicial candidates, in particular vetting conducted by the nation's largest legal organization, the American Bar Association (ABA). First, I demonstrate that poorly rated lower-court nominees are significantly more likely to have their nominations fail before the Senate. However, I also show that minority and female nominees are more likely than whites and males to receive these lower ratings, even after controlling for education, experience, and partisanship via matching. Furthermore, by presenting results showing that ABA ratings are unrelated to judges' ultimate reversal rates, I show that these scores are a poor predictor of how nominees perform once confirmed. The findings in this paper complicate the ABA's influential role in judicial nominations, both in terms of its utility in predicting judicial "performance" and also in terms of possible implicit biases against minority candidates, and suggest that political actors rely on these ratings perhaps for reasons unrelated to the courts.

Causal inference is considered the gold standard in social science research. Making causal claims about ``immutable characteristics'' such as race, however, has been strongly discouraged. In contrast to previous literature, which assumes a fixed conception of race, we propose a different framework that in some cases reconciles race and causation. First, we distinguish those units of analysis in which intrinsic problems of race and causality can be avoided. Second, we demonstrate that race can be defined as a composite measure that has some mutable elements. These extensions allow us to synthesize two areas where causal claims about race may be permissible: (1) studies that measure the effect of exposing an entity to a racial cue and (2) studies that disaggregate race into constituent pieces and measure the causal effect of some mutable element. We demonstrate these techniques via examples from contemporary scholarship

Recreational DNA ancestry testing may seem frivolous, or at least unconnected with important issues in politics and political science. But, in fact, it opens new vistas onto two crucial questions: what is the relationship, if any, between biology and race? How much and why do individuals and groups prefer clear, singular racial identities or blurred, mixed racial self-images? This article probes those questions from an unusual angle: media treatment of and public responses to various choices in DNA ancestry testing. We analyze two databases of U.S. newspaper articles, one with almost 6,000 and a second of 700 items, and two new public opinion surveys. The first uses vignettes to obtain the views of a representative sample of Americans, and the second probes the responses of a representative sample who have conducted such tests. We find that the media emphasize stories focused on singularity, and that vignette respondents also generally prefer and are more influenced by singular rather than plural test results. Minority group members are especially receptive to DNA testing and its message of group singularity. Views of actual testers, however, suggest that when all Americans have access to genome sequencing, the politics of racial ancestry testing may change dramatically.

The recent subprime mortgage crisis has brought to the forefront the possibility of discriminatory lending on the basis of race or gender. Using the over 10 million observations collected by the federal government in 2006 through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, this paper explores these claims causally. In so doing, the paper explores two possible theories of discrimination: (1) that any discriminatory lending patterns are picking up the fact that minority borrowers went to different lenders, perhaps as a result of predatory lending, and (2) the possibility that individual lenders discriminated against identically situated borrowers. The results presented provide limited evidence for the idea that borrowers of different races went to different lenders, but only in certain regions of the country and only for certain minority groups. In addition, many of these results are sensitive to missing confounders – e.g., financial data like credit scores and down payments, which the federal government does not collect. Ultimately, the results’ sensitivity suggests that more data gathering is in order before definitive assertions can be made by legal and policy actors.