Judicial Conflict and Consensus: Behavioral Studies of American Appellate Courts

This essay probes the relationship among different kinds of political cultures, the conduct of judicial elections, and the extent of dissent on the state supreme courts of California, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas from 1850 to 1920 The introduction at the turn of the twentieth century of Progressive election reforms—most notably the secret ballot, the direct party primary, and the nonpartisan ballot—reduced levels of turnout in judicial contests and increased roll-off from major statewide political to judicial elections These reforms made judicial elections the tail on the electoral kite and denied the public its best means of regulating judicial policy making Yet these changes in the electorate's behavior were seemingly unrelated to variations in the rate of dissent in these four state courts, whose judges apparently viewed popular partisan election as more a potential than a real threat to their independence

Progressive Reform and the Decline of Democratic Accountability: The Popular Election of State Supreme Court Judges, 1850‐1920

. While there is an extensive literature on the causes of dissensus on appellate courts in the US, few empirical studies exist of the causes of dissent in Canadian Supreme Court. The current study seeks to close that gap in the literature, proposing and then testing what we call a Canadian model of dissent. We find that the likelihood of dissent is strongly related to four broad factors that appear to exert independent influence on whether the Court is consensual or divided: political conflict, institutional structure, legal ambiguity in the law and variations in the leadership style of the chief justice.Resume. Les causes de dissension dans les cours d'appel aux Etats-Unis font l'objet de nombreux articles et publications, mais il existe tres peu d'etudes empiriques sur les causes de dissidence a la Cour supreme du Canada. La presente etude vise a combler cette lacune en proposant, un modele canadien de dissension, puis en le mettant a l'epreuve. Nous avons constate que le risque de dissension est fortement lie a quatre facteurs generaux qui semblent exercer une influence independante, que la Cour soit en accord ou divisee. Ces facteurs sont le conflit politique, la structure institutionnelle, la presence d'une ambiguite juridique dans la loi et le style de direction du juge en chef.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/202C0A8B7A1F88F917685DA6F69D64F0/S0008423911000151a.pdf/div-class-title-explaining-dissent-on-the-supreme-court-of-canada-div.pdf

Explaining Dissent on the Supreme Court of Canada

The decision-making tendencies of judges on intermediate state appellate courts have not been frequently studied because these courts issue few nonunanimous decisions. The high proportion of unanimous decisions has led scholars to presume that these courts are engaged primarily in routine error correction of trial court decisions and that judges' political and social background characteristics cannot therefore be important factors affecting this level of appellate review. Rather than analyze the voting tendencies of individual judges, however, this study examines the outcomes of decisions made by three-judge appellate panels in a large sample of unanimous and nonunanimous cases considered by the California Courts of Appeal from 1970 to 1983. Although nearly 90 percent of these decisions were unanimous, significant variation was found in the outcome of intermediate appellate court decisions, depending upon the partisan composition of the panel and the party affiliation of the justice assigned to write the majority opinion.

The Illusion of Judicial Consensus Revisited: Partisan Conflict on an Intermediate State Court of Appeals *

Using weighted least squares analysis, we examine the effects of region and judicial selection system on the characteristics of state supreme court judges. The article tests hypotheses concerning the quality of judges, specifically the ability of merit plans to recruit superior judges, and the openness of various selection systems. Major findings are that region is the main factor accounting for variations in judges' backgrounds and no method of recruitment selects judges with substantially different credentials. However, merit selection systematically is less open to religious minorities.

The selection of state supreme court justices

Scholarly efforts to link the social background of appellate court judges to their actions have been consistently unsuccessful.1 Various reasons have been offered for the impossibility of verifying an intuitively satisfying explanation of judicial behavior. It has been variously contended that statistical measures employed are inadequate, that scholars have selected the wrong dependent variables, or that there is no soundly based theoretical framework from which hypotheses can logically be deduced linking specific background to specific behavior.2 Another reason for the lack of an ascertainable relationship between background and judicial behavior may be the level of analysis. Most social background studies attempt to relate individual backgrounds to individual judge behaviors and do not focus on the broader question of the impact of social backgrounds on the collective behavior of judges at the court level. It is entirely possible that differences between indi-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3234294.pdf

Gregory J. Rathjen

Papers

Background Diversity & State Supreme Court Dissent Behavior