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

The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

This article assesses how the institutional context of decision making on three-judge panels of the federal Court of Appeals affects the impact that gender and race have on judicial decisions. Our central question is whether and how racial minority and women judges influence legal policy on issues thought to be of particular concern to women and minorities when serving on appellate panels which decide cases by majority rule. Proper analysis of this question requires investigating whether women and minority judges influence the decisions of other panel members. We find that the norm of unanimity on panels grants women influence over outcomes even when they are outnumbered on a panel.

/pdf/institutional-dynamics-on-the-u-s-court-of-appeals-minority-2kwwwgqves.pdf

Institutional Dynamics on the U.S. Court of Appeals: Minority Representation Under Panel Decision Making

How judges think

Whether campaign advertising influences election outcomes is an open question; a paradox given the amount spent on campaigning in general and TV advertising in particular. We argue that such “absence of documentation” is due to the focus of the empirical literature on the United States, in which the allocation of campaign spending and advertising is decentralized. We explore a quasinatural experiment that enables us to mitigate the omitted variables and reverse causality problems caused by decentralized allocation. In Brazil, gubernatorial elections work in a two-round system. In the first round, candidates’ TV time shares are determined by their coalitions’ share of seats in the National Parliament. In the second round, TV time is split equally between the first-round winner and runner-up. Using differences between rounds as a source of variation, we find a large causal effect of TV advertising on election outcomes.

Campaign Advertising and Election Outcomes: Quasi-Natural Experiment Evidence from Gubernatorial Elections in Brazil

In this symposium essay, we investigate the effect of economic conditions on the voting behavior of U.S. Supreme Court Justices. We theorize that Justices are akin to voters in political elections; specifically, we posit that the Justices will view short-term and relatively minor economic downturns - recessions - as attributable to the failures of elected officials, but will consider long-term and extreme economic contractions - depressions - as the result of exogenous shocks largely beyond the control of the government. Accordingly, we predict two patterns of behavior in economic-related cases that come before the Court: (1) in typical times, when the economy cycles through both recessionary and prosperous periods, the Justices will punish the elected branches of government when the economy contracts by voting less frequently for the government; and (2) in atypical times, when the economy moves into a period of deep depression, the Justices will work with the other branches of government by voting more frequently for the government. We test our hypotheses through statistical analysis of taxation opinions rendered by the Supreme Court during the period from 1913 to 1929 (a relatively normal period) and the period from 1930 to 1940 (the Great Depression). We find broad support for our hypothesis in the data we analyze, and we verify that our results are robust to a change in the measure of the economic condition as well as to a change in the specification of the regression model. We conclude that U.S. Supreme Court Justices exhibit voting patterns similar to voters in political elections when it comes to the economy.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1632918_code337501.pdf?abstractid=1632918&mirid=1

Economic Trends and Judicial Outcomes: A Macrotheory of the Court

We use NOMINATE (Nominal Three Step Estimation) (Poole and Rosenthal, 1983, 1997) to estimate ideal points for all Supreme Court Justices in Brazil from 2002 to 2012. Based on these estimated preferences we identify the nature of the two main dimensions along which disagreements tend to occur in this Court. These estimates correctly predict over 95% of the votes on constitutional review cases in each of the compositions of the Court which we analyze. The main contribution of the paper is to identify that the main dimension along which preferences align in the Brazilian Supreme Court is for and against the economic interest of the Executive. This is significantly different than the conservative-liberal polarization of the US Supreme Court. Our estimates show that along this dimension the composition of the Court has been clearly favorable to the Executive's economic interests, providing the setting in which the dramatic transformation in institutions and policies that the country has undergone in last two decades could take place.

/pdf/how-judges-think-in-the-brazilian-supreme-court-estimating-59poncik3a.pdf

How judges think in the Brazilian Supreme Court: Estimating ideal points and identifying dimensions

Este trabalho estima o impacto dos gastos de campanha no resultado das eleicoes para deputado federal do Distrito Federal em 2006. O efeito desses gastos e menor do que o esperado e caracteristicas da historia politicados candidatos desempenham papel significativo na quantidade de votosrecebidos. O impacto dos gastos no resultado eleitoral e tao menor quantomaior for o dispendio, de forma que o alto volume de gastos eleitorais feito pelos candidatos parece exagerado. Ainda que o dinheiro possua importância para o resultado eleitoral, ele “compra” bem menos votos do que a variavel “poder”, um resultado importante para uma eventual reforma do processo eleitoral.

/pdf/compra-de-votos-estimativas-do-efeito-do-gasto-eleitoral-nas-1ehx5y044v.pdf

Pedro Fernando Almeida Nery Ferreira

Papers

How judges think in the Brazilian Supreme Court: Estimating ideal points and identifying dimensions

Compra de votos: estimativas do efeito do gasto eleitoral nas eleições do DF em 2006