Although scholars increasingly acknowledge a contemporaneous relationship between public opinion and Supreme Court decisions, debate continues as to why this relationship exists. Does public opinion directly influence decisions or do justices simply respond to the same social forces that simultaneously shape the public mood? To answer this question, we first develop a strategy to control for the justices' attitudinal change that stems from the social forces that influence public opinion. We then propose a theoretical argument that predicts strategic justices should be mindful of public opinion even in cases when the public is unlikely to be aware of the Court's activities. The results suggest that the influence of public opinion on Supreme Court decisions is real, substantively important, and most pronounced in nonsalient cases.In the final analysis it is simply not clear whether the Court responds to public opinion, or shapes public opinion, or whether it responds to the same sort of factors that themselves shape public opinion. (Gibson 1990, 290) D oes public opinion influence Supreme Court decisions? The answer to this question holds implications for the debate over how justices decide cases, the sources of the Court's legitimacy and how that may be threatened, and the extent to which the Court acts as a majoritarian or countermajoritarian institution. Yet, despite the theoretical and normative importance of understanding the relationship between public opinion and the Supreme Court, Gibson's (1990) words still resonate. A vast literature documents an empirical association between public opinion and judicial decisions (Flemming, Bohte, and Wood 1997; Giles, Blackstone, and Vining Christopher J. Casillas is a Ph.D. Candidate in the for helpful comments. Data needed to replicate the analyses presented in this article can be found at http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/Enns.

We argue that actors can attempt to shield their policy choices from unfavorable review by crafting them in a manner that will increase the costs necessary for supervisory institutions to review them. We apply this theory to the US Supreme Court and demonstrate how justices strategically obfuscate the language of majority opinions in the attempt to circumvent unfavorable review from a politically hostile Congress. The results suggest that Supreme Court justices can and do alter the language of their opinions to raise the costs of legislative review and thereby protect their decisions.

In a recent issue of Political Analysis, Grant and Lebo authored two articles that forcefully argue against the use of the general error correction model (GECM) in nearly all time series applications of political data. We reconsider Grant and Lebo’s simulation results based on five common time series data scenarios. We show that Grant and Lebo’s simulations (as well as our own additional simulations) suggest the GECM performs quite well across these five data scenarios common in political science. The evidence shows that the problems Grant and Lebo highlight are almost exclusively the result of either incorrect applications of the GECM or the incorrect interpretation of results. Based on the prevailing evidence, we contend the GECM will often be a suitable model choice if implemented properly, and we offer practical advice on its use in applied settings.

This book is the first study specifically to investigate the extent to which U.S. Supreme Court justices alter the clarity of their opinions based on expected reactions from their audiences. The authors examine this dynamic by creating a unique measure of opinion clarity and then testing whether the Court writes clearer opinions when it faces ideologically hostile and ideologically scattered lower federal courts; when it decides cases involving poorly performing federal agencies; when it decides cases involving states with less professionalized legislatures and governors; and when it rules against public opinion. The data shows the Court writes clearer opinions in every one of these contexts, and demonstrates that actors are more likely to comply with clearer Court opinions.

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