Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the U.S. Supreme Court

Estimating Vote-Specific Preferences from Roll-Call Data Using Conditional Autoregressive Priors

“…When estimated in separate models, distance to the court median and to the chief justice are negatively associated with being assigned to author by the chief justice, both when used alone to predict assignment and in the model including all predictors. These findings are consistent with a class of theoretical models (both formal and informal) in which the chief justice simultaneously tries to assign opinions to individuals who share his policy views while also maintaining the stability the the majority coalition (e.g., Lax and Cameron 2007). The results for the majority median and cutpoint distances are weaker and less consistent between the univariate and multivariate models.…”

“…For example, while scholars have frequently observed the constraining effect of the norm of equal assignment of opinion-writing responsibilities across the justices and proposed norm-based justifications for this practice, our analysis suggests a norm of balanced workloads may be supported by the Chief Justice's strategic assignment of opinions to justices who are closest to him in a given case (cf. Lax and Cameron 2007). But where one Chief Justice (Burger) might use this flexibility to ensure the author is relatively close to his own position, another might use this flexibility to ensure the author is relatively close to the median of the court (Warren).…”

“…Opinion assignment on the Supreme Court is one of the longest-studied phenomena in the A class of formal and informal models of opinion-writing predicts that who writes the opinion could matter greatly for the content of the opinion (Lax and Cameron 2007;Bonneau, Hammond, Maltzman and Wahlbeck 2007;Maltzman, Spriggs and Wahlbeck 2000). We refer to these models of bargaining and opinion assignment as "author influence models" models and contrast them with "monopoly models," which predict that opinion authorship does not matter.…”

“…Other arguments are more oriented around the Court's actual institutional rules and constraints and make arguments about author influence (e.g., Lax and Cameron 2007) or the difference in bargaining leverage between members of the majority coalition and members of the minority coalition (Carrubba et al 2012;Cameron and Kornhauser N.d.). Related arguments contend that justices likely to "switch" sides and are therefore more marginal members of the majority coalition have special influence (e.g., Lax and Rader 2015).…”

Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions?

“…Bargaining then proceeds under an open rule: other justices are able to make costless counterproposals (i.e., suggest changes in the opinion). Assuming costless bargaining allows us to explore opinion writer influence that does not rely upon previously derived sources of influence, such as formal agenda-setting powers (see Hammond, Bonneau, and Sheehan 2005;Lax and Cameron 2007;Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck 2000). Once a stable opinion emerges (more on that below), each justice in the proto-majority decides what action to take.…”