How Court Composition and Organisational Characteristics Shape Asylum Adjudication in Germany

Germany’s asylum adjudication displays striking disparities in rejection rates and case duration across administrative courts. Yet the drivers of this variation remain largely unclear, in part due to limited data availability. This paper systematically investigates how variation in staff composition and organisational characteristics is associated with asylum adjudication outcomes across all 48 German administrative courts between 2010 and 2021. Leveraging a novel database on administrative courts including gender balance, average age, years of experience, and the number of judges alongside organisational indicators such as relative workload and the share of chamber decisions, the study assesses how these factors relate to two key performance measures: average duration of proceedings and rejection rates. By situating judicial outcomes within the broader organisational context of administrative courts, this study advances a more comprehensive institutional understanding of inequality in asylum adjudication and contributes to comparative research on judicial capacity and administrative decision-making.