Dimensions Underlying Economic Policymaking in the Early and Later Burger Courts

Measuring the Preferences of State Supreme Court Judges

“…In studies far too numerous to list here, the most prominent scholars of the day (e.g., Schubert 1965;Rohde and Spaeth 1976) used cumulative scaling to reduce the justices' past votes into various dimensions and then rank the justices along these dimensions. In fact, this technique of inferring preferences from votes continues to be used, even in relatively recent research (e.g., Ducat and Dudley 1987;Hagle and Spaeth 1992).…”

Factor analysis versus multi-dimensional scaling: binary choice roll-call voting and the US Supreme Court

“…Clausen, 1973;Wilcox and Clausen, 1991), while recent work using sophisticated MDS techniques (Poole and Rosenthal, 1997) has suggested that there is one overwhelmingly predominant factor in historical patterns of congressional roll voting and that a two-dimensional representation accounts for almost all the variance. 1 Similarly, Schubert's (1974, Chapter 7) work on the Supreme Court using a form of MDS (smallest space analysis) argues for one fewer dimension than does his earlier work on factor analysis of court decisions (Schubert, 1965, while more recent authors who use factor analysis (Dudley and Ducat, 1986;Ducat and Dudley, 1987) also find more dimensions in Supreme Court decisions than those who use MDS (Grofman and Brazill, in press). Similarly, some authors who use factor analysis to study the dimensionality of voters in the US have found separate loadings for pro-Democrat and pro-Republican dimensions rather than a unidimensional structure with strong Democratic supporters on one side and strong Republican supporters on the other (Weisberg, 1980).…”

The Supreme Court of Canada and Strategic Decision Making: Examining Justices’ Voting Patterns during Periods of Institutional Change

“…Studies by Ducat and Dudley (1987), Ostberg et al (2002) and Wetstein, Ostberg, and Ducat (1999) utilized factor analysis as a means of determining the dimensionality of judicial decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada during the Dickson and Lamer natural courts. In the late Dickson Court (1989 to 1990) Wetstein et al (1999) noticed a shift in the dimensionality of Charter decisions, finding that the justices tended to decide these cases in either a crime control versus due process dimension or an ethic of care versus ethic of justice dimension.…”