Refugee Roulette on Crooked Tables? Examining Structural Biases in Austrian Asylum Adjudications

Many Western European countries are experiencing a sharp increase in asylum applications, following the intensification of conflicts or continued instability in the Middle East, Western Asia and several African countries. Equal and fair treatment in asylum adjudication is important to ensure that judging follows the rule of law, to uphold the legitimacy of the judiciary and to strengthen public support. However, a series of recent empirical studies highlight substantial disparities in asylum adjudication. The present paper aims to contribute to that literature by exploring asylum adjudication by the Austrian Asylum Court, where cases are randomly assigned either to individual judges or to judicial panels. Based on an original data set of 50,000 asylum appeals between 2008 and 2013, we first examine whether there are systematic differences in asylum appeal decisions between judges. We then analyse whether characteristics of individual judges and the specific merits of the case affect the verdicts of the appeals. Specifically, we expect gender and work experience as well as the country of origin and legal representation to have a systematic influence on judges’ grant rates. Our study extends existing research by examining case merits and judge characteristics in a unified research design. Testing the prevalence of the rule of law empirically is important for ensuring the functioning of democracy, the legitimacy of the judiciary, and public trust in democratic institutions. Even more importantly, equal and fair asylum adjudications are of ultimate importance for individual applicants and their future life prospects.