The literature on judicial behavior indicates that dissent is costly to the individual judge, for it means an increased workload and the incurrence of reputational costs. This observation leads to the concept of dissent aversion, which is the notion that judges may refrain from dissenting, even though they disagree with the court's position, in order to avoid those costs. In this article, I explore the fact that voting at the Brazilian Supreme Court is sequential, and that this sequence varies in almost every single case, to generate a quasi‐experiment that allows for a clearer identification of dissent aversion than is found in other contexts. The main idea is that after a majority has been formed, the justices who vote in sequence know that their votes cannot change the outcome of the case. Hence, they may deviate from their preferred votes and join the majority to avoid the costs of dissenting. Using a unique dataset with vote‐level data of all abstract review cases heard by the full Court from 1990 until 2015, this study finds strong evidence of dissent aversion in the Brazilian Supreme Court. Judges who vote after the pivotal judge are significantly less likely to dissent.

中文翻译：

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巴西最高法院对异议的反感和依序投票

有关司法行为的文献表明，异议对个别法官而言代价高昂，因为这意味着工作量增加和声誉成本的增加。这种观察引出了异议回避的概念，该概念是即使法官不同意法院的立场，法官也应避免异议，以免产生这些费用。在本文中，我探讨了一个事实，即巴西最高法院的投票是按顺序进行的，而且该顺序在几乎每个案例中都不同，从而产生一种准实验，与其他情况相比，该实验可以更清楚地识别异议的厌恶情绪。 。主要思想是，在形成多数之后，按顺序投票的法官知道其投票不能改变案件的结果。因此，他们可能会偏离其偏爱的选票，而加入多数选票以避免产生异议的代价。该研究使用了一个完整的数据集，该数据集包含了1990年至2015年整个法院审理的所有抽象审查案件的投票级数据，这项研究发现了巴西最高法院反对异议的有力证据。在关键法官之后投票的法官的异议可能性大大降低。