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Majority opinion

About: Majority opinion is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4107 publications have been published within this topic receiving 54845 citations. The topic is also known as: opinion of the court.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Herrera et al. as mentioned in this paper used the Center for Political Studies 1986 National Election Study and a mail survey of the U.S. House of Representatives to look at representation collectively and dyadically.
Abstract: The political views of citizens should be reflected in the government of a democratic society. Typically, citizens' views are expressed by their elected representatives. We used the Center for Political Studies (CPS) 1986 National Election Study and a mail survey of the U.S. House of Representatives to look at representation collectively and dyadically. Collectively, we find some degree of congruence between leaders and followers. However, there are significant differences between them on half of the issue items, with the leaders usually taking more extreme positions than the followers. We looked at leaders and followers dyadically in 33 districts using Achen's measures of representation. We found that the representatives' views are fairly close to those of their constituents, that representatives are efficient at positioning themselves at the mean constituent position, and that representatives respond to shifts in liberalism/ conservatism in their districts. Legislative representation has been the topic of numerous political debates. One controversy centers on the role of the legislator in relation to his or her constituency. Are legislators free to act as they please? Should they use their own judgment to do what is best for their constituents? Or are representatives, by definition, required to reflect accurately the opinions of their constituents? We respond "no" Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 56:185-205 ? 1992 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research All nghts reserved. 0033-362X/92/5602-0001$02.50 CHERYL LYN HERRERA is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. RICHARD HERRERA is assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University. ERIC R. A. N. SMITH is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We would like to thank Richard Brody, John Geer, Kim F. Kahn, John Kessel, Patrick Kenney, Warren Miller, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1988 Western Political Science Association meeting in San Francisco. Some of the data used in this paper were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. We bear sole responsibility for the analyses and interpretations presented here. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.33 on Sat, 26 Nov 2016 04:22:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 186 Herrera, Herrera, and Smith to the first question and argue that legislators should use their own judgment as well as reflect public interest and opinion. This is consistent with Pitkin's definition of political representation, which includes the idea that legislators should act in the interest of those represented and that "they should look after the public interest and be responsive to public opinion, except insofar as non-responsiveness can be justified in terms of the public interest" (Pitkin 1967, p. 224). In democracies, citizens' views are expressed by their elected representatives. Thus, most empirical studies of representation focus on the extent of agreement between political leaders and the mass public. Agreement between legislators and the public can be conceived of collectively or dyadically (Weissberg 1978). Collective representation refers to a collective body representing a people, while dyadic representation refers to a particular legislator and the constituency that elected that legislator. We shall employ both dyadic and collective measures of representation in order to provide as much information about the representativeness of members of Congress as possible. We use the opinions of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives, rather than the rollcall votes, because we believe that representatives' opinions serve as proxies for their behavior. Studies show a high correlation between congressional attitudes and roll-call behavior (Smith, Herrera, and Herrera 1990; Sullivan and O'Connor 1972). In addition, "congressional attitudes are important in their own right, functioning in the long gestation period before roll-calls, setting the agenda, and framing the specific questions to be decided by a roll-call" (Backstrom 1977, p. 412).

58 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that the author of the majority opinion exercises the most influence over the Court's opinion-writing process and so can determine what becomes Court policy, at least within the limits of what some Court majority finds acceptable.
Abstract: Some scholars argue that the author of the majority opinion exercises the most influence over the Court’s opinion-writing process and so can determine what becomes Court policy, at least within the limits of what some Court majority finds acceptable. Other students of the Court have suggested that the Court’s median justice effectively dictates the content of the majority opinion: whatever policy the median justice most wants, she can get. We test these competing models with data on Supreme Court decision making during the Burger Court (1969‐86). While we find substantial evidence for both models, the agenda control model gains greater support. This suggests that opinions on the Court on each case are driven, in general, by the interaction of three key variables: the policy preferences of the majority opinion author, the policy preferences of the median justice, and the location of the legal status quo. A fter a half century of research on decision making by the Supreme Court, a key question remains unanswered: what policy will be prescribed by the Court’s majority opinion in each case? To understand the development of the majority opinion, and thus of the resulting law, we need to know which justice or justices most influence the Court’s opinions. Answering this question depends upon knowing the relative power of each justice to shape the opinion. The failure by empirically oriented legal scholars to address this question stems from a widespread belief that the justices’ policy preferences alone determine the decisions they make and that a majority of the Court must join an opinion before it has the force of law. As a result, it is argued that decision making is driven simply by the median justice’s policy preferences. This view is reflected

58 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, an integrated case-related model of judicial decision-making is presented, which shows that the type of issue raised, the identity of the challenging party, the constitutional arguments advanced, the centrality of the constitutional challenge, and the lower court ruling on constitutionality all have independent impact on state supreme court decisions in judicial review cases.
Abstract: Employing data from more than three thousand state supreme court judicial review cases, I construct and test an integrated case-related model of judicial decision making. Logit analysis reveals that the type of issue raised, the identity of the challenging party, the constitutional arguments advanced, the centrality of the constitutional challenge, and the lower court ruling on constitutionality all have an independent impact on state supreme court decisions in judicial review cases. The findings clearly provide support for the notion that more complex theoretical and methodological approaches provide a more complete explanation of judicial decision making.

57 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors found that people who hold the minority opinion expressed that opinion less quickly than people who held the majority opinion, and that the difference in speed in the expression of the minority and majority opinions grew as the difference between the size of the majority and minority grew.
Abstract: Five studies revealed that people who hold the minority opinion express that opinion less quickly than people who hold the majority opinion. The difference in speed in the expression of the minority and majority opinions grew as the difference in the size of the minority and majority grew. Also, those with the minority view were particularly slow when they assumed the majority to be large, whereas the opposite was true for those with the majority view. The minority slowness effect was not found to be linked to attitude strength, nor was it influenced by anticipated public disclosure of the attitude. The effect is discussed in the context of implicit conformity pressures and the limited buffering effect of false consensus assumptions.

57 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the absence of more information from the Court, the authors identify plausible legal arguments for the next few rounds of litigation and assess the stakes for social welfare, and conclude that some of the most salient legal arguments after Heller have little or no likely consequence for public welfare based on available data.
Abstract: What will happen after Heller? We know that the Supreme Court will no longer tolerate comprehensive federal prohibitions on home handgun possession by some class of trustworthy homeowners for the purpose of, and perhaps only at the time of, self-defense. But the judiciary could push further, if nothing else by incorporating Heller's holding into the Fourteenth Amendment and enforcing it against states and municipalities. In fact, the majority opinion offered little guidance for future cases. It presented neither a purely originalist method of constitutional interpretation nor a constraining doctrinal framework for evaluating other regulation - even while it gratuitously suggested that much existing gun control is acceptable. In the absence of more information from the Court, we identify plausible legal arguments for the next few rounds of litigation and assess the stakes for social welfare. We conclude that some of the most salient legal arguments after Heller have little or no likely consequence for social welfare based on available data. For example, the looming fight over local handgun bans - an issue on which we present original empirical data - seems largely inconsequential. The same can be said for a right to carry a firearm in public with a permit. On the other hand, less prominent legal arguments could be quite threatening. Taxation and regulation targeted especially at firearms might be presumptively disfavored by judges in the future, along the lines of free speech doctrine. This could have serious consequences. In addition, Second Amendment doctrine might generally dampen enthusiasm for innovative regulatory responses to the problem of gun violence. The threat of litigation may inhibit policy experimentation ranging from micro-stamping on shell casings, to pre-market review of gun design, to so-called personalized firearms, and beyond.

57 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202313
202238
202114
202027
201923
201820