Patterns of Supreme Court Decision - Making , 1937 - 2000 ∗
نویسندگان
چکیده
A key explanatory variable in many scientific accounts of the U.S. Supreme Court is the preferred policy position (or ideal point) of each justice. In this paper we measure the ideal points of each justice serving from 1937 to 2000 using a measurement model derived from a simple, uni-dimensional spatial model of votes on the merits. The measures we obtain are dynamic, in that justices’ ideal points are allowed to change over time while simultaneously controlling for changes in the content of the cases coming before the Court. To assess the validity of our measure, we present strong empirical evidence that from 1937 to 2000 the observed votes on the merits are consistent with our uni-dimensional model. This is a striking finding given that most previous work has suggested that the relevant issue space is multi-dimensional. In addition to estimating the ideal points, we perform inference about other quantities of substantive interest about the Court, such as the location of the median justice in each term, and the extent to which preferences on the Court are homogenous over time. We also compare and contrast the properties of our measure with existing ones. We conclude with the implications of our findings for past and future work on Supreme Court decision-making. Our measures are available electronically on the world wide web for use by other scholars.
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