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

Pedro Fernando Almeida Nery Ferreira, +1 more
- 01 Sep 2014 - 
- Vol. 15, Iss: 3, pp 275-293
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TLDR
In this paper, the authors used NOMINATE (Nominal Three Step Estimation) to estimate ideal points for all Supreme Court Justices in Brazil from 2002 to 2012 and identified the nature of the two main dimensions along which disagreements tend to occur in this Court.
Abstract
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.

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References
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Book

Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting

TL;DR: Poole and Rosenthal as mentioned in this paper used 200 years of congressional roll call voting as a framework for an interpretation of important episodes in American political and economic history, finding that over 80 percent of a legislator's voting decisions can be attributed to a consistent ideological position ranging from ultraconservatism to ultraliberalism.
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On the Rationale of Group Decision-making

TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a type of reasoning which will contribute to the development of the theory of tradeunions, the firm, and the cartel; and provide the basis for a theory of the equilibrium distribution of taxation or of public expenditure.
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TL;DR: The Choices Justices make: A strategic account of the Supreme Court's decision-making process is presented in this paper, where the authors show that justices realize that their ability to achieve their policy and other goals depends on the preferences of other actors, the choices they expect others to make, and the institutional context in which they act.
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A Spatial Model for Legislative Roll Call Analysis

TL;DR: In this paper, a general nonlinear logit model is used to analyze political choice data, and the robustness and face validity of the program outputs are evaluated on the basis of roll call voting data for the US House and Senate.
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How Judges Think in the Brazilian Supreme Court: Estimating Ideal Points and Identifying Dimensions?

The paper uses NOMINATE to estimate ideal points for Supreme Court Justices in Brazil and identifies the main dimension of disagreement as being for or against the economic interest of the Executive.