Diversity, Bias and Judicial Decision-Making: The Role of Gender in Asylum Adjudication of German Administrative Courts

Germany’s asylum adjudication is characterised by concerning disparities in rejection rates across administrative courts. Prior research highlights judges’ identity, especially gender, as a key determinant of judicial outcomes. However, while such associations are well-established in contexts like the US, systematic analyses for Germany are scarce due to limited data availability. This article addresses this gap by introducing a new database on German asylum adjudication and analysing the role of gender across all 48 administrative courts between 2010 and 2021. The database comprises a unique and comprehensive dataset of court statistics, a dataset on the composition of a court's judiciary (including gender, age and tenure) as well as a corpus of asylum judgments and an associated case-level meta-dataset. Drawing on theories of socio-legal studies, representative and street-level bureaucracy, and judicial behaviour, the study proceeds in three parts. First, it examines how the judiciary’s diversity impacts court-level decision-making, backlog, and the duration of proceedings. Second, the study shifts to the individual level to explore potential biases among judges. Using case-level data, it reassesses the impact of judge gender and examines interactions between the judge and plaintiff gender, nationality, and asylum claim. Third, this study goes beyond binary appeal outcomes to analyse judicial reasoning within judgements. By applying computational text analysis, this part investigates how gender dynamics and case characteristics shape opinion writing and reasoning. This research advances our understanding of judicial behaviour in asylum adjudication and contributes to broader debates on representation, procedural fairness, and the role of gender in judicial decision-making.