Policy Goals, Strategic Choice, and Majority Opinion Assignments in the U.S. Supreme Court: A Replication

TLDR: In this article, a replication of Rohde's study on the assignment of majority opinions in the U.S. Supreme Court is presented, showing that the primary hypothesis of the opinion assigner will assign the majority opinion to himself or to the Justice whose position is closest to his own on the issue in question.

Abstract: This research note is a replication of David W. Rohde's study entitled "Policy Goals, Strategic Choice and Majority Opinion Assignments in the U.S. Supreme Court." In the original, Rohde offered a theory of the assignment of majority opinions, the primary hypothesis of which held that the opinion assigner will assign the majority opinion to himself or to the Justice whose position is closest to his own on the issue in question. Using all civil liberties cases decided by the Warren Court as the data set, Rohde found the hypothesis to be supported in the aggregate,, across issue areas and across individual assignees. This replication is undertaken to determine whether Rohde's primary hypothesis is supported when tested in a different empirical universe. The data used to test the primary hypothesis in this report are all economics cases decided by the Warren Court from 1959 to 1969. In this study, unlike the original, the primary hypothesis is found not to be supported. This result is consistent whether following Rohde's replication precisely or using a methodological variation described in the text.