Journal ArticleDOI
Punctuated Equilibrium and the Supreme Court
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In this article, the authors make a prima facie case for the applicability of PE theory to the Court and leverage network rankings of Supreme Court decisions to create a proxy for legal policy change that improves on existing measures.Abstract:
In the legislative and executive branches, policy scholars have used punctuated equilibrium (PE) theory to describe and explain patterns of change. However, there has been little examination of how PE might apply to courts and legal policy change. This article addresses that gap by providing evidence that legal policy change—here conceptualized as changes in what precedents the Supreme Court most often cites—is governed by PE theory. After making a prima facie case for the applicability of PE theory to the Court, I leverage network rankings of Supreme Court decisions to create a proxy for legal policy change that improves on existing measures. Using both a stochastic process model and an analysis of the punctuations the measure uncovers, I find strong evidence of PE processes.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Revisiting Margaret Thatcher’s law and order agenda: The slow-burning fuse of punitiveness
TL;DR: The authors explored the aims, content and outcomes of various Acts of Parliament passed between 1982 and 1998 in England and Wales and found that while a trend towards punitiveness is detectable, this was due to wider discourses stemming from the New Right of the 1980s, which promoted a new conception of how best to tackle rising crime.
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Moral panics and punctuated equilibrium in public policy: an analysis of the criminal justice policy agenda in Britain
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider how moral panics contribute to punctuated equilibrium in public policy by drawing together broader societal anxieties or fears and thereby precipitating or accelerating changes in the dominant set of issue frames.
Journal ArticleDOI
Culture and Legal Policy Punctuation in the Supreme Court's Gender Discrimination Cases
TL;DR: In this paper, a case study of the US Supreme Court's equal protection and gender cases from the 1970s is presented, focusing on the concepts of cultural cognition and cultural surprise.
Journal ArticleDOI
Punctuated Equilibria in the Private Sector and the Stability of Market Systems
TL;DR: This paper examined longitudinal trends in expenditures by over 1,200 private firms, finding evidence of punctuated equilibrium, a pattern of change widely interpreted as evidence of stick-slip dynamics in decision-making processes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Point Predictions and the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory: A Data Mining Approach—U.S. Nuclear Policy as Proof of Concept
TL;DR: In this article, a mixed-methods data-mining approach is used to analyze the distribution of the nuclear energy RD&D budget in the United States and then these data are used in a generalized linear model to predict specific budget shifts.
References
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MonographDOI
Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors place politics in time and place it in the context of social science inquiry. But they do not discuss the role of time in the process of institution design.
Journal ArticleDOI
L-Moments: Analysis and Estimation of Distributions Using Linear Combinations of Order Statistics
TL;DR: The authors define L-moments as the expectations of certain linear combinations of order statistics, which can be defined for any random variable whose mean exists and form the basis of a general theory which covers the summarization and description of theoretical probability distributions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Agenda Dynamics and Policy Subsystems
TL;DR: The authors showed that rapid change in public policy outcomes often occurs, but most theories of pluralism emphasize only incrementalism. Yet from a historical view, it can easily be seen that many policies go through lo...
Journal ArticleDOI
Measuring Issue Salience
Lee Epstein,Jeffrey A. Segal +1 more
TL;DR: The authors proposed an alternative approach to measure issue saliency for elite actors: the coverage the media affords to a given issue, which is a reproducible, valid, and transportable method of assessing whether the particular actors under investigation view an issue as salient or not.
Journal ArticleDOI
Venue Shopping, Political Strategy, and Policy Change: The Internationalization of Canadian Forest Advocacy
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a more complicated analysis of the practice of venue shopping and argue that advocates choose venues not only for short-term strategic reasons, but also because they have embraced a new understanding of the nature of a policy problem.