Studying the Judicial Elites: A Methodological Approach

This chapter offers a methodological contribution to the study and analysis of the judiciary. Judicial politics has sought to examine courts and their judges using various methods and research techniques from the social sciences. These range from qualitative studies based on interviews, ethnographies, and analysis of judicial rulings, to quantitative studies based on surveys, databases with votes and rulings, as well as experiments and mixed methods. The legal culture of judges and the internal dynamics of the judiciary are phenomena that have mainly been studied using ethnographic techniques and in-depth interviews. This chapter uses a survey to unveil the legal culture of judges and describes the data collection process and the strategies that proved most useful in gaining access to one of the most isolated and understudied elites within the political system: subnational judges in the federal judiciary.