Explaining Asylum Law Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis

This article demonstrates how Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) can be applied to the study of case law, with an emphasis on the granular analysis of jurisprudence. This article’s empirical focus is a study of asylum decisions issued by the US Circuit Courts. Prior research, using statistical methods, has observed disparities in asylum case outcomes that are partly explained by sociopolitical factors such as the partisan affiliation, gender, and home-state politics of the judiciary. This article uses QCA to revisit these findings; incorporating an analysis of jurisprudential criteria alongside the sociopolitical factors that have been identified by prior studies. All of the Circuit Court decisions for the cases included in the QCA analysis were issued during the first year of the Trump presidency; a time at which asylum-seekers at the US–Mexico border were becoming a focal point both for immigration enforcement and a polarized national debate over immigration policy. Despite the charged political context for these decisions, the QCA findings show that the two most decisive factors for Circuit Court decision-making on these cases were their rulings on nexus and patterns of decision-making that were specific to each court. The closing discussion cautions the reader against generalizing these findings to all appellate-level asylum decisions out of consideration for the epistemological orientation of QCA. Hence, the findings from this study should not be taken as conclusive evidence that sociopolitical factors are of little causal value for research on the appellate courts. Nevertheless, the findings do indicate that more attention should be paid to the explanatory power of jurisprudence. The concluding discussion also highlights the potential that QCA holds for building out a logic-based theory of legal decision making that can account for jurisprudence in tandem with sociopolitical factors and localized cultures of decision-making that help to explain disparate applications of the law.