Jurisprudential Regimes and Supreme Court Decisionmaking: The Lemon Regime and Establishment Clause Cases

In this research note, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article in American Political Science Review to the area of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. We hypothesize that Lemon v. Kurtzman represented a jurisprudential regime in the Supreme Court's decisionmaking in this area of law. Our analysis shows that the predictors of the Court's decisions in the two periods differed in ways that are very consistent with the types of changes one would expect the hypothesized regime shift to produce.     

Prediction of first ballot mock jury votes by the Analytic Juror Rater

Two scales of Abbott's (1987) Analytic Juror Rater (AJR) were used with 24 mock jurors to predict first ballot mock jury votes. Each participant observed one of two mock trial proceedings involving an actual second degree murder case. In a moot courtroom, they heard arguments from attorneys and witnessed examination of the defendant and actors portraying witnesses. The Cosmopolitan Lifestyle Scale of the AJR successfully predicted first ballot votes of participants (p<.02), while the Non-Authoritarian Scale showed a non-significant trend in the hypothesized direction. It was concluded that, in cases where evidence is not strong, the AJR may lend modest assistance to the attorney using peremptory challenge to eliminatevenire members who may be biased against a defendant.     

Electoral equilibrium in double member districts

The median-voter result, and the issue of stability in electoral competition generally, have been examined from a number of different perspectives. Out of all these examinations, however, only a few focus on institutional variables. This essay demonstrates that the median-voter result is robust under a significant institutional change that entails altering the basic assumption of single-member districts. After developing a model of electoral competition in a two-member, first-two-past-the-post district, I show that, if there are three candidates, the set of Nash equilibria is the set of strategy triples (x ₁, x ₂, x ₃), with x ₁ = x ₂ = x ₃ = x*, and such that x* lies between the quantiles of order 1/3 and 2/3. If there are four candidates, I show that a unique Nash equilibrium exists with all candidates adopting a position at the medianvoter's ideal point.     

Technology transfer to developing nations

What’s a developing nation? For that matter, what’s technology transfer? When put in the context of exporting and importing technology, the answers are moot. Transfer still turns on how much someone — developed, developing or undeveloped — is willing to pay for the technology, and whether there is an identifiable need that it can satisfy with a minimum of sophistication. The simpler — and cheaper — the better. That may very well become the theme of a new worldwide movement called “appropriate technology”, which, among several other matters, is also discussed in this paper.