Lauderdale, Benjamin E. and Clark, Tom (2012) The Supreme Court’s many median justices. American Political Science Review, 106 (4). pp. 847-866. ISSN 0003-0554
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across areas of the law, and that limitations in our ability to measure those preferences have constrained the set of questions scholars pursue. We introduce a new approach, which makes use of information about substantive similarity among cases, to estimate judicial preferences that vary across substantive legal issues and over time. We show that a model allowing preferences to vary over substantive issues as well as over time is a significantly better predictor of judicial behavior than one that only allows preferences to vary over time. We find that judicial preferences are not reducible to simple left-right ideology and, as a consequence, there is substantial variation in the identity of the median justice across areas of the law during all periods of the modern court. These results suggest a need to reconsider empirical and theoretical research that hinges on the existence of a single pivotal median justice.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJourna... |
| Additional Information: | © 2012 American Political Science Association |
| Divisions: | Methodology |
| Subjects: | J Political Science > JK Political institutions (United States) K Law > K Law (General) |
| Date Deposited: | 28 Nov 2012 09:14 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Dec 2024 00:11 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/46525 |
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