The Auditing of Public Policy and the Politics of Auditing: The U.S. GAO and Israel's State Comptroller

A purist conception of audit independence appears to be obsolete. A survey of audit activities of the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) and Israel's State Comptroller describes pressures on audit bodies to examine sensitive policy issues and to enter partisan and personal squabbles between elected officials. The critique of the GAO by the National Academy of Public Administration recommends that legislators refrain from asking the audit body to deal with politically sensitive issues. In order to salvage something from the principle of audit independence, it appears more realistic to urge diligence on the part of the supreme auditor.     

Confirmation Politics and The Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court: Institutional Loyalty, Positivity Bias, and the Alito Nomination

Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence (2003a, 2003b, 2005) expound the theory of positivity bias in their analysis of the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore. This theory asserts that preexisting institutional loyalty shapes perceptions of and judgments about court decisions and events. In this article, we use the theory of positivity bias to investigate the preferences of Americans regarding the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. More specifically, from the theory of positivity bias, we derive the hypothesis that preferences on the Alito confirmation are shaped by anterior commitments to the Supreme Court. Based on an analysis of a national panel survey, we find that those who have a high level of loyalty toward the Supreme Court rely much more heavily on what we term judiciousness—in contrast to ideology, policy, and partisanship—in forming their opinions on whether to confirm Alito. Thus, institutional loyalty provides a decisive frame through which Americans view the activity of their Supreme Court.