Accounting for the Voting Behavior of State Supreme Court Justices on Cases Pertinent to Inequality

2021 ◽  
pp. 200-233
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
State Supreme Court

scholarly journals Estimating Dynamic Ideal Points for State Supreme Courts

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason H. Windett ◽  
Jeffrey J. Harden ◽  
Matthew E. K. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Superior Performance ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Common Space ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Ideal Points ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Measurement Strategies

Courts of last resort in the American states offer researchers considerable leverage to develop and test theories about how institutions influence judicial behavior. One measure critical to this research agenda is the individual judges' preferences, or ideal points, in policy space. Two main strategies for recovering this measure exist in the literature: Brace, Langer, and Hall's (2000, Measuring preferences of state supreme court judges,Journal of Politics62(2):387–413) Party-Adjusted Judge Ideology and Bonica and Woodruff's (2014, A common-space measure of state supreme court ideology,Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, doi: 10.1093/jleo/ewu016) judicial CFscores. Here, we introduce a third measurement strategy that combines CFscores with item response (IRT) estimates of judicial voting behavior in all fifty-two state courts of last resort from 1995 to 2010. We show that leveraging two distinct sources of information (votes and CFscores) yields a superior estimation strategy. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of the combined measure: (1) it is estimated dynamically, allowing for the possibility that judges' ideological leanings change over time and (2) it maps judges into a common space. In a comparison against existing measurement strategies, we find that our measure offers superior performance in predicting judges' votes. We conclude that it is a valuable tool for advancing the study of judicial politics.

scholarly journals Competing Interests in State Supreme Courts: Justices' Votes and Voting Rights

2003 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 267-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Graves
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The State ◽  
Presidential Election Of 2000 ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Ballot Access ◽  
Using Data

The presidential election of 2000 put a spotlight on the substantial opportunities for judicial involvement in the electoral process and the potential for partisan and ideological preferences to conflict in judicial choices. Building on recent scholarship analyzing the influence of institutions and preferences on state supreme court decision-making, I hypothesize that in cases involving voting rights decisions the partisan affiliation of justices rather than ideology contributes to justices’ voting behavior. Using data from the State Supreme Court Data Project and other data, I test the comparative influence of traditional left-right ideology and alignment with the dominant party of the state on ballot access cases. I find evidence that partisanship does matter to justices in ballot access cases, conditional on the method of judicial selection.

A Bottom-Up Account of State Supreme Court Opinion Writing

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-114
Author(s):  
Elisha Carol Savchak ◽  
Jennifer Barnes Bowie
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Opinion Writing

scholarly journals The Complicated Business of State Supreme Court Elections: An Empirical Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Heise
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Campaign Contributions ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Judicial Elections ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
State Supreme Court ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Judicial Outcomes

Proponents of judicial elections and related campaign activities emphasize existing First Amendment jurisprudence as well as similarities linking publicly-elected state judges and other publicly-elected state officials. Opponents focus on judicial campaign contributions’ corrosive effects, including their potential to unduly influence judicial outcomes. Using a comprehensive data set of 2,345 business-related cases decided by state supreme courts across all fifty states between 2010–12, judicial election critics, including Professor Joanna Shepherd, emphasize the potential for bias and find that campaign contributions from business sources to state supreme court judicial candidates corresponded with candidates’ pro-business votes as justices. While Shepherd’s main findings generally replicate, additional (and alternative) analyses introduce new findings that raise complicating wrinkles for Shepherd’s strong normative claims. Findings from this study illustrate that efforts to influence judicial outcomes are not the exclusive domain of business interests. That is, judicial campaign contributions from non- (and anti-) business interests increase the probability of justices’ votes favoring non-business interests. As a result, critiques of judicial elections cannot properly rely exclusively on the influence of business interests. Moreover, that both business and non-business interests can successfully influence judicial outcomes through campaign contributions point in different (and possibly conflicting) normative directions. On the one hand, even if one agrees that the judicial branch qualitatively differs from the political and executive branches in terms of assessing campaign contributions’ proper role, that the potential to influence judicial outcomes is available to any interest group (willing to invest campaign contributions) complicates popular critiques of judicial elections. On the other hand, the same empirical findings also plausibly strengthen critiques of judicial elections, especially for those who view the judicial domain differently than other political domains.

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