Agenda Setting, Issue Priorities and Organizational Maintenance: The US Supreme Court, 1955 to 1994

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEFF YATES ◽  
ANDREW B. WHITFORD ◽  
WILLIAM GILLESPIE
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
The United States ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Public Issues

In recent decades, political science has turned to the study of agenda setting as a central aspect of collective decision-making environments. The content of the public agenda – and the issue agendas of political institutions – make significant social change possible. Recent studies suggest that these political institutions are engaged in both competitive relationships, as they identify and pursue both active and latent public issues, and more complex cue-taking relationships. For separated powers, the problems of co-operation and competition with one another are entwined with internal collective decision-making dilemmas.In this study, we focus on the tension within a political institution between agenda setting as a mechanism for internal organizational maintenance, and agenda setting as a consequence of that institution's interaction with other branches of government and the general public. Specifically, we examine agenda setting by the United States Supreme Court, and ask the question of why the Court allocates more or less of its valuable agenda space to one policy issue over others. Our study environment is the policy issue composition of the Court's docket: the Court's attention to criminal justice policy issues relative to other issues. Among the most important powers of the Court is the power to apportion its agenda space among policy issues.Pacelle argues that the Court's agenda-building process, its culling of cases and issues from numerous petitions, may represent the most important sequence of decisions the Court makes. But the Court's docket is a finite agenda space on which some issues are provided with a larger proportion of the Court's attention. Allocating space to an issue can promote the issue's national visibility and legitimacy as an important public concern.

‘The Court, it is I’? Individual judicial powers in the Brazilian Supreme Court and their implications for constitutional theory

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
DIEGO WERNECK ARGUELHES ◽  
LEANDRO MOLHANO RIBEIRO
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Constitutional Theory ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Constitutional Courts ◽  
Institutional Fact

Abstract:Collective decision-making is often taken as an ‘institutional fact’ when it comes to supreme and constitutional courts. In this article, we focus on the example of the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, or STF) to argue that this feature should not be assumed from the outset, as it does not necessarily hold, across countries, for all relevant powers that courts may have. As this example illustrates, the assignment to individual Justices of three distinct powers, namely agenda setting, position taking, and decision making, can have profound effects on the legislative status quo outside the court, amounting in some circumstances to a form of individual judicial review. This expanded typology of court powers both points to an underexplored spectrum for comparing different courts and makes it necessary to discuss if and how particular distributions of such powers within multi-member courts are normatively justified. In the specific case of the STF, we argue that the specific combination of individual allocations of agenda setting and decision-making powers, which gives rise in practice to the possibility of individual judicial review, cannot be reconciled with basic tenets of constitutional theory.

The Field and Study of Deliberative Democracy in Australia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn M. Hendriks
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
Practical Project ◽  
Australian Context ◽  
Democratic System

Australia is recognized globally as an important hub for the study and practice of deliberative democracy. Both a normative and practical project, the field of deliberative democracy aims to improve the quality and inclusivity of public reasoning in collective decision-making. This chapter explores deliberative democracy in Australia from two angles. First, it discusses how a nation typically characterized by its adversarial and more majoritarian democratic system has become a significant international hotspot for scholars and practitioners of deliberative democracy. Second, the chapter examines how deliberative democracy has been applied as a lens to empirically study aspects of Australian politics. There is, the author argues, much more work for deliberative democrats to undertake in the Australian context, particularly in assessing and strengthening the deliberative capacity of the nation’s key political institutions.

Asymmetric Information and the Coherence of Legislation

1987 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 897-918 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Austen-Smith ◽  
William H. Riker
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Asymmetric Information ◽  
Private Information ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Committee Decision ◽  
Game Theoretic

Legislators' beliefs, preferences, and intentions are communicated in committees and legislatures through debates, the proposal of bills and amendments, and the recording of votes. Because such information is typically distributed asymmetrically within any group of decision makers, legislators have incentives to reveal or conceal private information strategically and thus manipulate the collective decision-making process in their favor. In consequence, any committee decision may in the end reflect only the interests of a minority. We address a problem of sharing information through debate in an endogenous, agenda-setting, collective-choice process. The model is game theoretic and we find in the equilibrium to the game that at least some legislators have incentives to conceal private information. Consequently, the final committee decision can be “incoherent” by failing to reflect the preferences of all committee members fully. Additionally, we characterize the subset of legislators with any incentive to conceal data.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Collective Judgment ◽  
Hidden Knowledge

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

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