Does case salience condition the role of ideological preferences in the decisions of U.S. Supreme Court justices? Does the attitudinal model of judicial behavior hold equally true in high salience and low salience cases? In this article, we analyze the role of case salience as a moderating influence on the explanatory capacity of the attitudinal model and test the strength of the model in high salience versus low salience contexts. Using civil rights votes during forty-seven Supreme Court terms, from 1953 through 2000, we find that the attitudinal model is sensitive to case salience and that justices rely significantly more on ideological preferences when deciding high salience cases than low salience ones. Our findings represent an important qualification to the attitudinal model.

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Although the pluralist theory of politics predicts that the focus of organizational activity should shift to the judicial arena whenever the expectations of government as regulator and the demands of regulated interests fail to converge, there has been little systematic research focusing on the question of business litigation as a specific form of interest mobilization. This article develops an integrated organizational choice model of interest mobilization to explain corporate litigation against the United States government. I argue that a company's decision to proceed with litigation is predicated upon the company's (1) resource capacity, (2) constraints of the regulatory environment, and (3) perception of procedural unfairness of the government in the administrative process. The argument is tested with data from a survey of top U.S. business executives whose companies unsuccessfully petitioned the government for administered protection between 1990 and 1995. The argument receives strong empirical support, and suggests that U.S. corporations facing import competition consider litigation an important component of their overall political strategy for obtaining nonmarket benefits.

Does media exposure to salient criminological events exacerbate racialized perceptions of injustice? We examine whether closely following media coverage of the fatal encounter of George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon Martin moderates racial and ethnic differences in opinion surrounding the event and the U.S. criminal justice system. Our analysis addresses several key aspects of the case: Whether Zimmerman would have been arrested sooner if Martin had been white, whether respondents felt Zimmerman's acquittal was justified, and whether there is racial bias against African Americans in the criminal justice system. Relying on national opinion surveys before and after Zimmerman's trial verdict, our findings support the racial gradient thesis by demonstrating that sustained exposure to racialized framing of the incident in the media affects Hispanics the most and hardens entrenched attitudes among African Americans relative to whites. The analysis supports the continuing relevance of the mass media in attitude formation.