To what degree is judicial agenda setting top-down or bottom-up? Existing studies lack evidence of the frequency or magnitude of these two processes. We conceptualize the judicial agenda as the legal questions/rules receiving judicial attention, measure it using citations to Supreme Court opinions, and estimate vector autoregression models to identify how each level of court initiates or responds to variation in attention to precedent at other levels of the judiciary. The Supreme Court exerts some top-down control, but agenda setting is more often bottom-up, revealing lower courts are more integral to setting the federal judicial agenda than previously understood.

Standard methods for measuring latent traits from categorical data assume that response functions are monotonic. This assumption is violated when individuals from both extremes respond identically, but for conflicting reasons. Two survey respondents may “disagree” with a statement for opposing motivations, liberal and conservative justices may dissent from the same Supreme Court decision but provide ideologically contradictory rationales, and in legislative settings, ideological opposites may join together to oppose moderate legislation in pursuit of antithetical goals. In this article, we introduce a scaling model that accommodates ends against the middle responses and provide a novel estimation approach that improves upon existing routines. We apply this method to survey data, voting data from the U.S. Supreme Court, and the 116th Congress, and show that it outperforms standard methods in terms of both congruence with qualitative insights and model fit. This suggests that our proposed method may offer improved one-dimensional estimates of latent traits in many important settings.

Judges, scholars, and commentators decry inconsistent areas of judicially created policy. This could hurt courts’ policy making efficacy, so why do judges allow it to happen? I show judicially-created policy can become inconsistent when judges explain rules in more abstract terms than they decide cases. To do so, I expand standard case-space models of judicial decision making to account for relationships between specific facts and broader doctrinal dimensions. This model of judicial decision making as a process of multi-step reasoning reveals that preference aggregation in such a context can lead to inconsistent collegial rules. I also outline a class of preference configurations on collegial courts (i.e., multi-member courts) in which this problem cannot arise. These results have implications for several areas of inquiry in judicial politics such as models of principal-agent relationships in judicial hierarchies and empirical research utilizing case facts as predictor variables.

What effect does political competition have in generating de facto judicial independence? We argue that competition in a legislature can drive increases in de facto judicial independence. Our game-theoretic model reveals that increased competition for seats impedes legislators’ ability to enact their platforms, regardless of government turnover probability, and increased legislative fractionalization also makes court intervention more likely. Utilizing a sample of democratic states, empirical evidence suggests when a country’s legislature is increasingly fractionalized among parties or has increasing seat turnover, we observe increases in de facto independence. This research provides new perspectives on the link between independence and competition.

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