1. Introduction and Overview. 2. Detecting Influential Observations and Outliers. 3. Detecting and Assessing Collinearity. 4. Applications and Remedies. 5. Research Issues and Directions for Extensions. Bibliography. Author Index. Subject Index.

Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.0022-3816.2004.00301.x

The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

AmajorfocusofjudicialpoliticsresearchhasbeentheextenttowhichideologicaldivergencebetweentheCourtandCongress can explain variation in Supreme Court decision making. However, conflicting theoretical and empirical findings have given rise to a significant discrepancy in the scholarship. Building on evidence from interviews with Supreme Court justices and former law clerks, I develop a formal model of judicial-congressional relations that incorporates judicial preferences for institutional legitimacy and the role of public opinion in congressional hostility towards the Supreme Court. An original dataset identifying all Court-curbing legislation proposed between 1877 and 2006 is then used to assess the influence of congressional hostility on the Court’s use of judicial review. The evidence indicates that public discontent with the Court, as mediated through congressional hostility, creates an incentive for the Court to exercise self-restraint. When Congress is hostile,theCourtusesjudicialreviewtoinvalidateActsofCongresslessfrequentlythanwhenCongressisnothostiletowards the Court. D uring each of the two recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the United States Senate, the Judiciary Committee noted its concern with what it perceived to be an overly aggressive Supreme Court and an imbalance in the separation of powers. Chairman Arlen Specter opened the confirmation hearings of John Roberts by commenting, “I’m very much concerned about what I conceive to be an imbalance in the separation-of-powers between the Congress and the court.IamconcernedaboutwhatIbluntlysayisthedenigration by the court of congressional authority.” 1 Senator Specter’s comments highlight a claim about American democracy which has been at the center of a lively academic debate for decades: the Supreme Court is an insulated legal body, free to make decisions away from the political pressures of Congress and the Executive. In this article, I challenge that claim. First, relying on evidence from interviews with Supreme Court justices and former law clerks, I establish a set of assumptions about judicial preferences that departs from previ

The Separation of Powers, Court Curbing, and Judicial Legitimacy

Loi pour coordonner les activites des differentes autorites responsables de la surveillance des services financiers aux Etats-Unis

Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform and consumer protection act

Although scholars increasingly acknowledge a contemporaneous relationship between public opinion and Supreme Court decisions, debate continues as to why this relationship exists. Does public opinion directly influence decisions or do justices simply respond to the same social forces that simultaneously shape the public mood? To answer this question, we first develop a strategy to control for the justices' attitudinal change that stems from the social forces that influence public opinion. We then propose a theoretical argument that predicts strategic justices should be mindful of public opinion even in cases when the public is unlikely to be aware of the Court's activities. The results suggest that the influence of public opinion on Supreme Court decisions is real, substantively important, and most pronounced in nonsalient cases.

How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court

There is wide scholarly agreement that the frequent replacement of justices has kept the Supreme Court generally attuned to public opinion. Recent research indicates that, in addition to this indirect effect, Supreme Court justices respond directly to changes in public opinion. We explore the two causal pathways suggested to link public opinion directly to the behavior of justices and the implications of the nature and strength of these linkages for current debates concerning Supreme Court tenure. The recent increase in the stability of Court membership has raised questions about the continued efficacy of the replacement mechanism and renewed debates over mechanisms to limit judicial tenure. Our analysis provides little evidence that justices respond strategically to public opinion but provides partial support for the idea that justices' preferences shift in response to the same social forces that shape the opinions of the general public. Our analysis offers preliminary evidence that—even in the absence o...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/S0022381608080316

The Supreme Court in American Democracy: Unraveling the Linkages between Public Opinion and Judicial Decision Making

Though there has been a substantial amount of research on the strategic behavior of legal actors, the literature is rife with conflicting findings. We contribute to this debate by examining whether U.S. court of appeals judges dissent for the purpose of inviting en banc and/or Supreme Court review. We consider key challenges associated with the empirical modeling of strategic behavior related to the selection of an appropriate unit of analysis for study and the consequences of introducing multicollinearity into statistical models. We explore these issues by examining the dissenting behavior of court of appeals judges from 1970–2002. Our findings indicate that court of appeals judges strategically dissent, and that this behavior is seldom captured by traditional quantitative analyses of judicial behavior. Though our focus is on court of appeals judges, we are confident our conclusions inform studies of strategic behavior in a variety of contexts.

Strategy and the Decision to Dissent on the U.S. Courts of Appeals

This article explores the efficacy of specifications grading in undergraduate political science classes. Specifications grading organizes instruction around a set of learning objectives and evaluat...

Specifications Grading in Political Science

Introductory American government is a common component of college and university core curricula and, as such, it often is taught in large sections. This makes active learning more difficult, which may contribute to student dissatisfaction and lower levels of student achievement. In turn, this can affect larger issues of university retention. This article considers whether different models of instruction in large classes affect student success and satisfaction. We compare a lecture-only class and one that combined lectures with smaller student breakout sessions. To our surprise, we found that students in the breakout—lecture class were not more satisfied and did not succeed at higher levels as compared to their peers in the lecture-only class. Above all, attendance is the key predictor of student success.

/pdf/assessing-the-effect-of-breakout-sessions-on-student-success-4sebkja8hz.pdf

Assessing the Effect of Breakout Sessions on Student Success and Satisfaction

This article investigates the attitudes of Israeli Jews on the proper relationship between religion and the state, using data from the 2009 Israeli National Election Study. Specifically we test whether association with the secular or religious communities structures mass attitudes on this important dimension of Israeli politics. Mass level disagreement in this area dates back to the pre-state period and represents a longstanding cleavage in Zionist thought and Israeli politics. We find that mass attitudes toward religion and public life are associated with religious observance and identification with religious parties and social groups.

Bethany Blackstone

Papers

The Supreme Court in American Democracy: Unraveling the Linkages between Public Opinion and Judicial Decision Making

Strategy and the Decision to Dissent on the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Specifications Grading in Political Science

Assessing the Effect of Breakout Sessions on Student Success and Satisfaction

Israeli Attitudes on Synagogue and State