The Amicus Game

Bils, Peter; Rothenberg, Lawrence S.; Smith, Bradley C.

doi:10.1086/707795

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…broader interest group networks (Bils, Rothenberg and Smith 2020, Box-Steffensmeier, Christenson and Hitt 2013, Christenson and Box-Steffensmeier 2017, Hazelton, Hinkle and Spriggs 2019.…”

Section: Amicus Briefs and Credit Claimingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pursuing Change or Pursuing Credit? Litigation and Credit Claiming on Social Media

Gunderson

Widner²,

Macdonald³

2023

J. law courts

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Interest groups often post about their judicial advocacy on social media. We argue that they do so for two main reasons. First, providing information about the courts on social media builds the group’s credibility as a source of information with policymakers, media and the public. Second, social media provides a way to claim credit for litigation activity and outcomes, which can increase membership and aid in fundraising. Using original datasets of millions of tweets and Facebook posts by interest groups, we provide evidence that interest groups use social media for public education and to credit claim for their litigation activity.

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“…broader interest group networks (Bils, Rothenberg and Smith 2020, Box-Steffensmeier, Christenson and Hitt 2013, Christenson and Box-Steffensmeier 2017, Hazelton, Hinkle and Spriggs 2019.…”

Section: Amicus Briefs and Credit Claimingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pursuing Change or Pursuing Credit? Litigation and Credit Claiming on Social Media

Gunderson

Widner²,

Macdonald³

2023

J. law courts

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“…One can also see it as financial and material support for the defence of the proposal when challenged in court, in the form of amicus briefs for instance (as modelled in Bils, Rothenberg and Smith (2020)).…”

Section: Modelling Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policymaking under Influence

Blumenthal¹

2022

Preprint

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Policymaking is a fraught process: politicians often fail to change the status quo despite their best efforts. Influential players, e.g. interest groups, bureaucrats or legislators, can make politicians’ proposals more or less likely to be implemented. I consider a model of policymaking with an imperfectly effective politician and an influential player who, through costly effort, can make the politician’s proposal more or less likely to replace the status quo. Introducing and exploiting a simple taxonomy of influential players’ preferences over policies, I show how and when threats, sabotage, or support can affect policymaking, depending on the influential player’s cost and strength of effort. Subsequently, I show that the relationship between the influential player’s ability to shape proposals and her cost of effort can be non-monotonic, discuss empirical implications of the model, highlight the importance of status quo policies, and connect this work to related strands of the literature.

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“…10.Whether this relationship between the quantity of briefs is causal or just correlational remains up for debate (Bils et al, 2020; Collins Jr. 2018; Dean & Cameron, 2021). It could be the case that interest groups mobilize in the form of amicus briefs when they are more likely to win—perhaps for organizational maintenance purposes.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Revolving Door in Judicial Politics: Former Clerks and Agenda Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court

Liu

Kastellec

2022

American Politics Research

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We examine the role of former clerks to Supreme Court justices on the Court’s agenda setting process. We find that when a former clerk is the attorney on either a cert petition or an amicus brief, the Court is more likely to hear a case, compared to advocacy by a non-former clerk. To help explain these patterns, we draw on the broader literature on “revolving door” politics. We argue that the most plausible mechanisms are either that former clerks are more effective advocates or that their presence in a case signals its importance to the Court. Alternatively, former clerks may select into cases that the Court is likely to grant. While we cannot definitively disentangle these competing mechanisms, the strong patterns in the data suggest that the importance of the revolving door in judicial politics extends broadly into the domain of agenda setting and is thus worthy of further investigation.

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The Amicus Game

Cited by 6 publications

References 27 publications

Pursuing Change or Pursuing Credit? Litigation and Credit Claiming on Social Media

Pursuing Change or Pursuing Credit? Litigation and Credit Claiming on Social Media

Policymaking under Influence

The Revolving Door in Judicial Politics: Former Clerks and Agenda Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court

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