Economic performance and U.S. Senate elections: A comment

This paper investigates the issue of economic performance and U.S. Senate elections analyzed by Bennett and Wiseman (1991) in a work published in this journal. Our study analyzes the electoral margins and election outcomes of U.S. Senate elections using state-level data involving only incumbents up for reelection in the 1976–1990 period (212 elections). The ordinary least squares and logit estimation results suggest that the effects of economic performance variables on incumbent senatorial elections are in general overshadowed by other factors known to be important in determining electoral margins and outcomes. In addition, the empirical results of the entire model are in general consistent with prior findings noted in the public choice and political science literature concerning the analysis of U.S. Senate elections. Therefore, we suggest that the findings raised in our study provide enough theoretical and empirical evidence to raise sufficient doubt regarding the robustness of the results suggested by Bennett and Wiseman (1991), and thus call upon other researchers to study further the relationship between economic performance and voting behavior in U.S. Senate elections.     

Supreme Court Justices’ Economic Behaviour: A Multilevel Model Analysis

Supreme Court justices are overlooked, but important, national policy‐making players who render final and consequential decisions in cases on economic conflicts. The research question asks what forces explain the decisional behaviour of Supreme Court justices in economic rights cases between a private and a public party. Theoretically, the decisional behaviour of an individual justice is a function of his or her notion as to what makes ‘good’ law, pursued in a cultural‐collegial setting that is oriented by majoritarian requirements, while constrained by the legal nature of the case being considered. Empirically, all economic decisions made by Norwegian Supreme Court justices in five‐justice panels from 1963 to 2012 are analyzed. Our multilevel model demonstrates that individual, collegial and case‐level forces all contribute to explain the justices’ votes. These results suggest that case‐related dynamics, such as who the plaintiff is or the amount of disagreement between justices, matter, but also that ideology – via appointment mechanisms – matters when a nation's high court justices decide economic cases. Understanding the foundational assumptions and the institutional procedures is vital when transporting judicial behaviour models across polities.