Showing papers on "Plurality opinion published in 2000"
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.
Abstract: The concept of issue salience has figured prominently in many studies of American political life. Long lines of research have taught us that both citizens and political elites may respond differently to issues that are salient to them than to those that are not. Yet analysts making such claims about elite actors face a fundamental problem that their counterparts in mass behavior do not: they cannot survey, say, members of the Supreme Court to ascertain those cases that are especially salient to the justices. Rather, scholars must rely on surrogates for issue salience-surrogates that are fraught with problems and that have led to disparate research results. Accordingly, we offer an alternative approach to measure issue salience for elite actors: the coverage the media affords to a given issue. We argue that this approach has substantial benefits over those employed in the past. Most notably, it provides a reproducible, valid, and transportable method of assessing whether the particular actors under investigation view an issue as salient or not. In making the case for our measure we focus on Supreme Court justices but we are sanguine about its applicability to other political actors
450 citations
Book•
17 Jul 2000
TL;DR: In this article, a strategic response to draft opinions is presented, along with the decision to accommodate and the politics of coalition formation in the context of coalitions in the European Parliament.
Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Selecting an author: assigning the majority opinion 3. A strategic response to draft opinions 4. The decision to accommodate 5. The politics of coalition formation 6. Conclusion.
433 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: The per curiam opinion was first used in 1862 as an efficient way of resolving such routine matters as dismissals for lack of jurisdiction and motion decisions by the Supreme Court as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The Supreme Court per curiam opinion, which proclaims itself the collaborative product of all the Justices in supporting an outcome, was first used in 1862 as an efficient way of resolving such routine matters as dismissals for lack of jurisdiction and motion decisions. Starting in the 1930s, as the Roosevelt Court Justices increasingly exercised their prerogative to author dissenting and concurring opinions, even per curiams started to appear with dissents attached. Thereafter the Court began experimenting with the per curiam as a useful form for some of its more challenging cases, including such major decisions as Ex Parte Quirin and the desegregation decisions that applied Brown v. Board of Education to other settings. More recently, the Court has used the per curiam as an effective way to deal with a change of authorship in Brandenburg v. Ohio, a need for haste in New York Times Co. v. United States, and a strongly splintered Court in Furman v. Georgia. The release of a 138 page per curiam in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 completed its transformation from an indicator of an unimportant case to a strategic device capable of resolving a complicated and divisive issue. The per curiam made its most dramatic appearance in Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, where the Court employed it to depersonalize its response to the Florida Supreme Court's controversial decision and to present itself as an institution above politics and personal preference.
8 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: The complicated structure of the law of individual disparate treatment discrimination as sketched by the decisions of the Supreme Court is the result of the failure of Justice Brennan to command a majority on his approach in Price Waterhouse, which approach would have largely supplanted the earlier McDonnell Douglas approach as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The complicated structure of the law of individual disparate treatment discrimination as sketched by the decisions of the Supreme Court is the result of the failure of Justice Brennan to command a majority on his approach in Price Waterhouse, which approach would have largely supplanted the earlier McDonnell Douglas approach. Justice O'Connor's concurrence is the basis, therefore, of the development of two separate methodologies to analyze individual disparate treatment cases. That bifurcated approach is beginning to break apart into a number of new and different approaches at the court of appeals level. Some courts are construing the two main methodologies, Price Waterhouse and McDonnell Douglas, in ways that create enormous obstacles to a jury getting to try individual disparate treatment discrimination claims. Other courts are using several different interpretations of these two steams of authority to create a unitary approach to individual disparate treatment cases. It may well be that in the long run the approach initially advocated by Justice Brennan in his plurality opinion in Price Waterhouse may ultimately prevail.