Measuring the Preferences of State Supreme Court Judges

Abstract

The premise of this paper is that while the comparative study of courts can address some vitally important questions in judicial politics, these gains will not be secured without a valid and reliable measure of judge preferences that is comparable within and across courts. Party affiliation of judges is a commonly used but weak substitute that suffers from pronounced equivalence problems. We develop a contextually based, party‐adjusted surrogate judge ideology measure (PAJID) and subject this measure to an extensive array of validity tests. We also consider the measure's stability in predicting judge behavior over the course of the judicial career. As the results illustrate, PAJID offers a valid, stable measure of judge preferences in state supreme courts that is demonstrably superior to party affiliation in analyses of judicial decision‐making across areas of law and across 52 state high courts.

To elect or to appoint? Bias, information, and responsiveness of bureaucrats and politicians

“…The data for this project has primarily been collected from the State Court Data Project (Brace, Langer, and Hall (2000) Within our data, we retained those cases that were complete in their information and in which the justices sat en banc. 19 This left a total of 5958 criminal cases across the fifty states.…”

Campaign Contributions and Judicial Behavior

“…1 Brace, Langer, and Hall (2000) developed an alternative strategy for measuring the ideology of state supreme court justices-Party Adjusted Ideology scores (PAJID). However, I could not locate a PAJID score for Justice N. Patrick Crooks.…”

Institutional Effects on the Careers of State Supreme Court Justices

“…While the states chosen for partisan election and legislative selection were not random (as there are only four and two respectively), each other the other systems were randomized with certain conditions. They could not employ lifetime tenure, nor could they have switched method of (Brace, Hall, and Langer 2000) score and the state's respective Berry et al (1998) score. selection or retention during our timeline. This allows us more specifically to test our hypotheses.…”