Federalism in a Conservative Supreme Court

After years of maintaining an even balance on questions of federalism,the Supreme Court's views on the federal-state relationshiphave undergone a dramatic transformation with the recent changein the Court's composition. The new conservative majority hasproved willing to protect the states from direct regulationby the federal government in almost all circumstances. It remainsunclear, however, whether the Court will give increased protectionto state regulatory efforts-and whether the Court's new memberswill be willing to respect the autonomy of states that are exercisingtheir authority in an activist (and traditionally liberal) manner.     

Supreme Court Litigants and Strategic Framing

Although litigants invest a huge amount of resources in crafting legal briefs for submission to the Supreme Court, few studies examine whether and how briefs influence Court decisions. This article asks whether legal participants are strategic when deciding how to frame a case brief and whether such frames influence the likelihood of receiving a favorable outcome. To explore these questions, a theory of strategic framing is developed and litigants' basic framing strategies are hypothesized based on Riker's theory of rhetoric and heresthetic as well as the strategic approach to judicial politics. Using 110 salient cases from the 1979–89 terms, I propose and develop a measure of a typology of issue frames and provide empirical evidence that supports a strategic account of how parties frame cases.     

Presidential Power over Supreme Court Decisions

I calculate U.S. presidents’ power and power use concerning the ideological direction of U.S. Supreme Court decisions through their ability to appoint replacements to the Court, over the period 1946 through 2001. I test hypotheses concerning factors affecting appointment power and power use, and examine their effect on Senate confirmation votes. Of nine presidents, four have had the ability to affect the direction of more than 25 percent of Court decisions for sustained periods of time. Strongly ideological power use in appointment is found for four also. Senate confirmation votes have tended to be more favorable when the president has more appointment power.     

Norms and Political Payoffs in Supreme Court Recusals

Political Behavior - In times when the public and scholarly debates around the effects of norms on political decision making are at their height—and in light of the argument that government...     

Supreme Court Appointments as a Move-the-Median Game

A three-stage model isolates conditions under which an executive appointment to a collective choice body, such as a court or a regulatory agency, has an immediate bearing on policy. The model strikes a balance between previous formal models that predict either excessive gridlock or excessive policy responsiveness as a consequence of the politics of appointments. I test the model using approximately four decades of data on U.S. Supreme Court appointments. Two hypotheses summarize the unique predictions of the model and are strongly corroborated. A third, less distinctive hypothesis about strategic judicial retirements is weakly supported .     

Presidential Bureaucratic Power and Supreme Court Justice Voting

Presidency scholars suggest that the federal bureaucracy has become presidentialized and that the federal agencies have become a primary tool for presidential policy implementation. However, in its review of federal agency litigation, the Supreme Court stands as an important monitor of executive bureaucratic action. Here, the conditions under which Supreme Court justices choose to facilitate executive bureaucratic action are assessed. This study tests the proposition that Supreme Court justices' voting decisions to support the president's bureaucratic agents are conditioned upon theoretically interesting extra-legal factors. Logistic regression analysis was conducted on justices' votes from Supreme Court cases involving cabinet and independent agencies during the years 1953–1995. The results indicate that Supreme Court justices' voting decisions to favorably review bureaucratic actions are influenced by extra-legal factors including attitudinal, political, and external concerns.     

Measuring Attitudes toward the United States Supreme Court

It is conventional in research on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court to rely on a survey question asking about confidence in the leaders of the Court to indicate something about the esteem with which that institution is regarded by the American people. The purpose of this article is to investigate the validity of this measure. Based on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2001, we compare confidence with several different measures of Court legitimacy. Our findings indicate that the confidence replies seem to reflect both short-term and long-term judgments about the Court, with the greater influence coming from satisfaction with how the Court is performing at the moment. We suggest a new set of indicators for measuring the legitimacy of the Court and offer some evidence on the structure of the variance in these items.     

Ideological Proximity and Support for The Supreme Court

Although the Supreme Court is a countermajoritarian institution by design, many scholars have contended that without concrete powers, the Court relies on public support for legitimacy. Accordingly, it is important to understand the relationship between people’s ideological proximity to the Court and their support for it. Existing empirical research suggests a correspondence between public opinion and the Court’s positions, but these studies do not directly compare masses and elites in a common space. To address these issues, we conducted an original survey asking respondents about their positions on ten recently decided Supreme Court cases. This allows us to estimate the positions of citizens and justices on the same ideological scale. Further, while some existing theories of perceptions of judicial legitimacy suggest similar relationships between ideological distance and various types of support for the Court, we propose a theory of heterogeneous responsiveness which posits that citizens’ ideological distance from the Court should be negatively related to their approval of and trust in the institution, but positively related to their support for its countermajoritarian function. Our empirical approach finds support for the theory.     

Teaching Judicial Politics Through a Supreme Court Simulation

Abstract

This article describes various iterations of a Supreme Court simulation that we developed for undergraduate political science classes. We address when simulations should be used to introduce a topic to students, and when simulations should be used to develop students’ understanding of a topic after introducing it. In the simulations, we played the role of attorneys delivering oral arguments before the Supreme Court, while students played the role of Supreme Court justices. Students questioned attorneys, deliberated in groups, voted on the merits of the case, and explained their decisions. We varied when the simulation was conducted, with one class doing the simulation before a lesson on judicial decision making and two classes doing the simulation following a lesson on judicial decision making. We evaluate the simulation by using results from student questionnaires that assessed the students' interest in judicial politics, their knowledge of the Supreme Court, and their understanding of judicial decision making. We find that the simulation most effectively accomplished the intended learning outcomes when the simulation was conducted after a lesson on decision making in the Supreme Court, rather than before the lesson. In addition, our results demonstrate that the simulation increased students’ interest in the Supreme Court and their desire to learn more about the institution. Our results have implications for political scientists aiming to enhance student learning through simulations.     

Does Quality Matter? Challengers in State Supreme Court Elections

We assess whether quality challengers in state supreme court elections have a significant impact on the electoral successes of incumbents and whether the electorate seemingly makes candidate-based evaluations in these races. To address these questions, we examine 208 elections to the states' highest courts from 1990 through 2000 in the 21 states using partisan or nonpartisan elections to staff their benches. From a Heckman two-stage estimation procedure that takes into account factors influencing challengers' decisions to run as well as factors affecting the electorate's choices among candidates, we find that quality does matter. Experienced challengers significantly lessen the electoral security of incumbents, and the electorate appears to evaluate challengers' qualifications. These findings stand in stark relief to traditional notions that the electorate is incapable of responding to candidate stimuli beyond incumbency and that judicial elections inherently are an ineffective means for securing popular control over the bench.     

The Separation of Powers and Supreme Court Agenda Setting

This study employs the first systematic, empirical analysis that relies on archival data to examine whether the separation of powers influences justices' agenda votes. It spatially models how justices set the Court's agenda under a sincere approach as well as an SOP approach and compares the competing expectations derived therefrom. The results suggest that legislative and executive preferences fail to influence justices' votes. Across every model tested, the data show justices uninfluenced by the separation of powers. These results provide a strong rejoinder to SOP models, since the Court's agenda stage is the most likely stage of the decision‐making process to show signs of an SOP effect.     

The Institutionalization of the U.S. Supreme Court

In pursuing their goals, members of the U.S. Supreme Court areaffected by their institutional setting. How has that institutionalenvironment changed over time and what have been the politicalconsequences of those changes? Despite considerable analysisof the institutional dynamics of legislatures and executives,political scientists have been slow to bring time series techniquesto the study of the Supreme Court, and as a result much lessis known about its evolutionary path. Measuring a variety oforganizational characteristics, I construct an index of theinstitutionalization of the Supreme Court from 1790 to 1996.This indicator suggests that the integration of the Court intothe system of federal policy making has better enabled the justicesto satisfy their objectives. To demonstrate this empirically,I test a series of error correction models of judicial influence,each of which confirms that the nature of the Supreme Court'scharacter has had considerable implications for the scope ofthe justices' legal and political impact. These results underscorethe need for judicial scholars to examine the Court's policymaking in longitudinal perspective.     

Politics and personal factors in retirement from the United States Supreme Court

A vacancy to be filled on the Supreme Court is a relatively rare event; continuity of service is the norm. In this paper I determine the circumstances under which justices decide to retire and, by extension, why they remain on the bench. Using a discrete-time method I find that political considerations do not appear to matter. Justices are more likely to retire when they are physically infirm and have qualified for pension benefits. But the more justices participate in the Court's activity, as evidenced by the number of opinions or dissents they write, the less likely they are to leave voluntarily.     

On the Ideological Foundations of Supreme Court Legitimacy in the American Public

Conventional wisdom says that individuals’ ideological preferences do not influence Supreme Court legitimacy orientations. Most work is based on the assumption that the contemporary Court is objectively conservative in its policymaking, meaning that ideological disagreement should come from liberals and agreement from conservatives. Our nuanced look at the Court's policymaking suggests rational bases for perceiving the Court's contemporary policymaking as conservative, moderate, and even liberal. We argue that subjective ideological disagreement—incongruence between one's ideological preferences and one's perception of the Court's ideological tenor—must be accounted for when explaining legitimacy. Analysis of a national survey shows that subjective ideological disagreement exhibits a potent, deleterious impact on legitimacy. Ideology exhibits sensible connections to legitimacy depending on how people perceive the Court's ideological tenor. Results from a survey experiment support our posited mechanism. Our work has implications for the public's view of the Court as a “political” institution.     

Courting the President: How Circuit Court Judges Alter Their Behavior for Promotion to the Supreme Court

We examine whether circuit court judges sacrifice policy purity for career goals. We compare the behavior of contender judges–those most likely to be elevated to the Supreme Court–during vacancy periods with their behavior outside vacancy periods. We also examine the behavior of noncontender judges during those same times. The data show that during vacancy periods, contender judges are more likely to vote consistently with the president's preferences, to rule in favor of the United States, and to write dissenting opinions. Noncontender judges fail to evidence such behavior. These findings provide empirical support for the argument that federal judges adapt their behavior to specific audiences, and provide new avenues for research into judges' goals and the role of audiences in judicial decision making.