Abstract

Studies on judicial decision-making on constitutional courts have shown that the judges' ideology is a good predictor of their judicial behavior. However, it remains unclear to what extent this finding is generalizable to courts of cassation without constitutional control powers and integrated by career judges, who arrive at the court after decades working with-in the judiciary and who have been characterized as source of legal formalism and political neutrality within the court. To study this puzzle, the article analyzes 10 years of votes on split decisions by the Chilean Supreme Court's Public Law Chamber (N=14.135), where both career and non-career judges participate. The study applies an IRT model to identify the ideal points of each judge, as a latent variable that represent the propensity of judges to vote with the rest of judges, in non-unanimous cases. Against the myth of the ideological neutrality of career judges, the results show that career judges are divided in distinguish-able poles in the ideological cleavage of the Court.