Choices in Context: How Case-Level Factors Influence the Magnitude of Ideological Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court

Bartels, Brandon L.

doi:10.1177/1532673x10378633

Cited by 20 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…A conservative shift in the Court at term t predicts a smaller proportion of liberal reversals distributed at term t+1 . Consistent with previous research, the estimated effect of the Court's ideological composition appears larger among salient cases compared to nonsalient rulings (Bartels 2008; Unah and Hancock 2006). 34 Furthermore, unlike the results in Table 1, the measure of social forces does exhibit a statistically significant long‐run influence on the Court among salient cases.…”

Section: Nonsalient and Salient Casessupporting

confidence: 87%

“…The justices, however, must also balance the incentive to accommodate popular will against their desire to see case decisions reflect their own goals and preferences. Salient cases commonly involve issues where justices face the strongest competing desire to follow legal considerations or their personal ideology (Bartels n.d.; Unah and Hancock 2006), and their personal policy preferences are likely to be more clearly defined in salient cases (Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck 2000). If the Court's reservoir of diffuse support enables the justices to endure negative attention in select cases, they should arguably utilize that capital when deciding issues where their individual preferences are likely to have the greatest intensity.…”

Section: Nonsalient and Salient Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court

Casillas

Enns

Wohlfarth

2010

American J Political Sci

177

132

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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.

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Section: Nonsalient and Salient Casessupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Nonsalient and Salient Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court

Casillas

Enns

Wohlfarth

2010

American J Political Sci

177

132

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“…Not surprisingly, the results reveal a significant interaction effect, indicating that the monotonic increase across coefficients is significantly different from zero. Although these findings are consistent with some research on the Supreme Court (Bartels 2011;Collins 2008) and psychological theories of integrative complexity (Suedfeld 2010), the heterogeneous relationship between justice ideology and the probability of a liberal vote offers an important complement to the implicit predictions of the attitudinal model (Segal andCover 1989, Segal andSpaeth 2002). Panel (b) reports the results for policy mood.…”

supporting

confidence: 84%

The Swing Justice

Enns

Wohlfarth

2013

The Journal of Politics

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In the Supreme Court's most closely divided cases, one pivotal justice can determine the outcome. Given this fact, judicial scholars have paid substantial attention to the swing justice. This article makes two theoretical contributions to the study of the swing justice and this justice's resulting influence on case outcomes. First, we show that in a substantial number of cases, the justice that casts the pivotal vote is not the median justice on the Court. Second, we argue that the swing justice will typically rely less on attitudinal considerations and more on strategic and legal considerations than the other justices on the Court. The analysis suggests that even among the Court's most closely divided decisions, which are typically thought to reflect the Court's most ideologically driven outcomes, the pivotal swing vote is significantly less likely to reflect attitudinal predispositions and more likely to reflect strategic considerations, such as the public's preferences, and case-specific considerations such as the position advocated by the Solicitor General. The theory and findings suggest that a failure to consider the unique behavior of a pivotal actor-whether on the Supreme Court or any other decision-making body-can lead to incorrect conclusions about the determinants of policy outputs.

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“…First, Supreme Court justices are well‐trained jurists with well‐defined issue preferences, and an enormous body of literature emphasizes the power of judicial ideology in predicting their votes (e.g., Epstein, Knight, and Martin ; Segal and Spaeth ). Moreover, judicial literature suggests that the extent to which justices’ ideological preferences determine their decisions is affected by cases’ legal, political, and strategic factors, as these factors provide various contexts for ideological voting to take place (Bartels ; Corley, Steigerwalt, and Ward ). Hence, we suspect that the persuasive power of laughter in each case interacts with justices’ ideologies in predicting their votes.…”

Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humor and Persuasion: The Effects of Laughter during US Supreme Court's Oral Arguments

Li¹,

Pryor²

2020

Law & Policy

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Is the decision-making of Supreme Court justices influenced by extraneous factors beyond law and policy? We explore this question by examining attorney-induced laughter during oral arguments in cases heard by the Court. Drawing on theories of political psychology and social cognition, we posit that laughter serves as a positive affective cue that might favorably dispose justices (albeit subconsciously) to the side causing the laughter. Analyzing oral argument transcripts during the 1986-93 terms, we find that the side causing more instances of laughter is more likely to win the votes of individual justices, even while controlling for other legally and politically relevant factors. We further find that the effect of laughter is conditional-it exerts a heightened persuasive power on ideologically congruent justices, in noncomplex cases, and when the legal argumentation is of higher quality. Our research thus contributes to the growing literature on personal and emotional aspects of judicial decision-making and, specifically, the emerging scholarly interest in the role of humor during Supreme Court oral arguments.

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Choices in Context: How Case-Level Factors Influence the Magnitude of Ideological Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court

Cited by 20 publications

References 59 publications

How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court

How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court

The Swing Justice

Humor and Persuasion: The Effects of Laughter during US Supreme Court's Oral Arguments

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