Journal ArticleDOI
Measuring Policy Content on the U.S. Supreme Court
TLDR
This paper showed that the most common measure of the Supreme Court's ideological output, whether the Court's decision is liberal or conservative, suffers from systematic bias, and they trace this bias empirically and explain the undesirable consequences it has for empirical analyses of judicial behavior.Abstract:
Political scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of the influences on Supreme Court decision making. Yet, much less attention has been paid to empirical measures of the Court's ideological output. We develop a theory of the interactions between rational litigants, lower court judges, and Supreme Court justices. We argue that the most common measure of the Supreme Court's ideological output—whether the Court's decision is liberal or conservative—suffers from systematic bias. We trace this bias empirically and explain the undesirable consequences it has for empirical analyses of judicial behavior. Specifically, we show that, although the Court's preferences are positively correlated with the ideological direction of the justices’ decision to reverse a lower court, the attitudes of the justices are negatively related—and significantly so—to the ideological direction of outcomes that affirm lower court decisions. We also offer a solution that allows scholars to work around this “a...read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court
TL;DR: This paper developed a strategy to control for the justices' attitudinal change that stems from the social forces that influence public opinion and proposed 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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Constitutional Courts in Comparative Perspective: A Theoretical Assessment
TL;DR: The authors surveys recent literature that has explored the conditions that sustain judicial authority and explores the role of strategic judicial behavior in maintaining and expanding judicial power, concluding that strategic judicial behaviour is crucial for maintaining and increasing judicial power.
Journal ArticleDOI
Locating Supreme Court Opinions in Doctrine Space
TL;DR: This paper developed a scaling model to estimate opinion locations and justice ideal points along a common, continuous dimension using the citations between opinions as data, assuming that each opinion has a fixed location in this unidimensional doctrine space and that the probability of a citation that affirms rather than disputes the doctrine of the precedent decreases as the doctrinal distance between them increases.
Journal ArticleDOI
Locating Supreme Court Opinions in Doctrine Space
TL;DR: This article developed a scaling model to estimate U.S. Supreme Court opinion locations and justice ideal points along a common spatial dimension using data derived from the citations between opinions, and found empirical support for theoretical models that predict the majority opinion will fall at the ideal point of the median member of the majority coalition.
References
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Book
The choices justices make
Lee Epstein,Donald Jack Knight +1 more
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.
Book
The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited
TL;DR: In this article, two leading scholars of the US Supreme Court and its policy making, systematically present and validates the use of the attitudinal model to explain and predict Supreme Court decision making.
Journal ArticleDOI
Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999
Andrew D. Martin,Kevin M. Quinn +1 more
TL;DR: This paper employed Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to fit a Bayesian measurement model of ideal points for all justices serving on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 through 1999, and found that many justices do not have temporally constant ideal points.
Book
Public Opinion In America: Moods, Cycles, And Swings
TL;DR: Public opinion? the concept of policy mood developing a measure of mood the components of mood an electoral connection? reflections on the present and future of American politics? as mentioned in this paper, 2012.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices
Jeffrey A. Segal,Albert D. Cover +1 more
TL;DR: Using content analytic techniques, this paper derived independent and reliable measures of the values of all Supreme Court justices from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy, providing strong support for the attitudinal model.
Related Papers (5)
Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999
Andrew D. Martin,Kevin M. Quinn +1 more
Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices
Jeffrey A. Segal,Albert D. Cover +1 more