Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T08:09:19.864Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Strategic Retirement in Comparative Perspective: Supreme Court Justices in Presidential Regimes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Aníbal Pérez-Liñán  and
Ignacio Arana Araya
Aníbal Pérez-Liñán*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Ignacio Arana Araya
Affiliation:
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
*
Contact the corresponding author, Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, at [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Students of judicial behavior debate whether justices time their retirement to allow for the nomination of like-minded judges. We formalize the assumptions of strategic retirement theory and derive precise hypotheses about the conditions that moderate the effect of partisan incentives on judicial retirements. The empirical implications are tested with evidence for Supreme Court members under democracies and dictatorships in six presidential regimes between 1900 and 2004. The theory of strategic retirement finds limited support in the United States and elsewhere. We conclude that researchers should emphasize “sincere” motivations for retirement, progressive political ambitions, and—crucial in weakly institutionalized legal systems—political pressures.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Fall 2017 , pp. 173 - 197
Copyright
© 2017 by Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Research for this project was supported by National Science Foundation grant no. 0918886 and by FONDECYT project no. 3160357. We are indebted to Christopher Bonneau, Diana Kapiszewski, and Julio Ríos Figueroa for their comments and assistance. Replication files for this article are available in the online edition.

References

Adams, Gary A., and Terry A. Beehr. 2003. Retirement: Reasons, Processes, and Results. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Atkinson, David N. 1999. Leaving the Bench: Supreme Court Justices at the End. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Basabe, Serrano, Santiago. 2011. Jueces sin toga: Políticas judiciales y toma de decisiones en el Tribunal Constitucional del Ecuador (1999–2007). Quito: FLACSO Ecuador.Google Scholar
Berg-Schlosser, Dirk, and Gisèle De Meur. 2009. “Comparative Research Design: Case and Variable Selection.” In Configurational Comparative Methods, ed. Binoît Rihoux and Charles C. Ragin, 19–32. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M., and Bradford S. Jones. 2004. Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyea, Brent D. 2010. “Does Seniority Matter? The Conditional Influence of State Methods of Judicial Retention.” Social Science Quarterly 91 (1): 209–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brace, Paul. 1984. “Progressive Ambition in the House: A Probabilistic Approach.” Journal of Politics 46 (2): 556–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brace, Paul, and Brent D. Boyea. 2008. “State Public Opinion, the Death Penalty, and the Practice of Electing Judges.” American Journal of Political Science 52 (2): 360–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brenner, Saul. 1999. “The Myth That Justices Strategically Retire.” Social Science Journal 36:431–39.Google Scholar
Calabresi, Steven G., and James Lindgren. 2006. “Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered.” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 29:770–877.Google Scholar
Carter, David, and Curtis Signorino. 2010. “Back to the Future: Modeling Time Dependence in Binary Data.” Political Analysis 18 (3): 271–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castagnola, Andrea. 2012. “I Want It All, and I Want It Now: The Political Manipulation of Argentina’s Provincial High Courts.” Journal of Politics in Latin America 4 (2): 39–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chua, Lynette J., and Stacia L. Haynie. 2016. “Judicial Review of Executive Power in the Singaporean Context, 1965–2012.” Journal of Law and Courts 4 (1): 43–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cleveland, Jeanette N., and Lynn M. Shore. 1992. “Self- and Supervisory Perspectives on Age and Work Attitudes and Performance.” Journal of Applied Psychology 77 (4): 469–84.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Crowe, Justin, and Christopher F. Karpowitz. 2007. “Where Have You Gone, Sherman Minton? The Decline of the Short-Term Supreme Court Justice.” Perspective on Politics 5 (3): 425–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Lee, Jeffrey A. Segal, Harold J. Spaeth, and Thomas G. Walker, eds. 2006. Supreme Court Compendium: Data, Decisions, and Developments. 4th ed. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly.Google Scholar
Garrow, D. J. 2000. “Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court: The Historical Case for a 28th Amendment.” University of Chicago Law Review 67 (4): 995–1087.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginsburg, Tom, and Tamir Moustafa, eds. 2008. Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grijalva, Agustín. 2010. Courts and Political Parties: The Politics of Constitutional Review in Ecuador. Saarbrücken: VDM.Google Scholar
Guevara, Mann, Carlos. 2011. Political Careers, Corruption, and Impunity: Panama’s Assembly, 1984–2009. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Hagle, Timothy M. 1993. “Strategic Retirements: A Political Model of Turnover on the United States Supreme Court.” Political Behavior 15 (1): 25–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Melinda Gann. 2001. “Voluntary Retirements from State Supreme Courts: Assessing Democratic Pressures to Relinquish the Bench.” Journal of Politics 63 (4): 1112–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanmer, Michael J., and Kerem Ozan Kalkan. 2013. “Behind the Curve: Clarifying the Best Approach to Calculating Predicted Probabilities and Marginal Effects from Limited Dependent Variable Models.” American Journal of Political Science 57 (1): 263–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansford, Thomas G., Elisha Carol Savchak, and Donald R. Songer. 2010. “Politics, Careerism, and the Voluntary Departures of U.S. District Court Judges.” American Politics Research 38 (6): 986–1014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrington, Joseph E., Jr. 2000. “Progressive Ambition, Electoral Selection, and the Creation of Ideologues.” Economics of Governance 1 (1): 13–23.Google Scholar
Helmke, Gretchen. 2005. Courts under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Helmke, Gretchen. 2016. Institutions on the Edge: The Origins and Consequences of Inter-branch Crises in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Henkens, Kène, and Frits Tazelaar. 1997. “Explaining Retirement Decisions of Civil Servants in the Netherlands: Intentions, Behavior, and the Discrepancy between the Two.” Research on Aging 19 (2): 139–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilbink, Lisa. 2007. Judges beyond Politics in Democracy and Dictatorship: Lessons from Chile. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Richard W., and Melissa Favreault. 2001. “Retiring Together or Working Alone: The Impact of Spousal Employment and Disability on Retirement Decisions.” Working Paper no. 2001-01, Centre for Retirement Research, Boston College.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Mark P., Sebastian Saiegh, Pablo T. Spiller, and Mariano Tommasi. 2002. “Amateur Legislators–Professional Politicians: The Consequences of Party-Centered Electoral Rules in a Federal System.” American Journal of Political Science 46 (3): 656–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerby, Matthew, and Andrew C. Banfield. 2014. “The Determinants of Voluntary Judicial Resignation in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 52 (3): 335–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Gary. 1987. “Presidential Appointments to the Supreme Court: Adding Systematic Explanation to Probabilistic Description.” American Politics Quarterly 15:373–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lara Borges, Oswald, Andrea Castagnola, and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán. 2012. “Diseño constitucional y estabilidad judicial en América Latina, 1900–2009.” Política y Gobierno 19 (1): 3–40.Google Scholar
Linzer, Drew A., and Jeffrey K. Staton. 2015. “A Global Measure of Judicial Independence, 1948–2012.” Journal of Law and Courts 3 (2): 223–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maitra, Pushkar, and Russell Smyth. 2005. “Determinants of Retirement on the High Court of Australia.” Economic Record 81 (254): 193–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcilese, José. 2010. “La intervención del sistema judicial bonaerense durante el primer peronismo.” Historia Constitucional 11 (1): 275–96.Google Scholar
Massie, Tajuana, Kirk A. Randazzo, and Donald R. Songer. 2014. “The Politics of Judicial Retirement in Canada and the United Kingdom.” Journal of Law and Courts 2 (2): 273–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nixon, David C., and J. David Haskin. 2000. “Judicial Retirement Strategies: The Judge’s Role in Influencing Party Control of the Appellate Courts.” American Politics Quarterly 28 (4): 458–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pepinsky, Thomas. 2014. “The Institutional Turn in Comparative Authoritarianism.” British Journal of Political Science 44 (3): 631–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Liñán, Aníbal, Barry Ames, and Mitchell A. Seligson. 2006. “Strategy, Careers, and Judicial Decisions: Lessons from the Bolivian Courts.” Journal of Politics 68 (2): 284–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Liñán, Aníbal, and Andrea Castagnola. 2016. “Judicial Instability and Endogenous Constitutional Change: Lessons from Latin America.” British Journal of Political Science 46 (2): 395–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Przeworski, Adam, and Henry Teune. 1970. The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry. New York: Wiley-Interscience.Google Scholar
Solomon, Peter H., Jr. 2010. “Authoritarian Legality and Informal Practices: Judges, Lawyers and the State in Russia and China.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 43 (4): 351–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spriggs, James F., II, and Paul J. Wahlbeck. 1995. “Calling It Quits: Strategic Retirement on the Federal Courts of Appeals, 1893–1991.” Political Research Quarterly 48 (3): 573–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Squire, Peverill. 1988. “Politics and Personal Factors in Retirement from the United States Supreme Court.” Political Behavior 10:180–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stolzenberg, Ross M., and James Lindgren. 2010. “Retirement and Death in Office of U.S. Supreme Court Justices.” Demography 47 (2): 269–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stras, David R. 2006. “The Incentives Approach to Judicial Retirement.” Minnesota Law Review 90 (5): 1417–46.Google Scholar
Tribe, Laurence H. 1985. God Save This Honorable Court. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Vining, Richard L., Christopher Zorn, and Susan Navarro Smelcer. 2006. “Judicial Tenure on the US Supreme Court, 1790–1868: Frustration, Resignation, and Expiration on the Bench.” Studies in American Political Development 20 (2): 198–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallis, W. Allen. 1936. “The Poisson Distribution and the Supreme Court.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 31:376–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Artemus. 2003. Deciding to Leave: The Politics of Retirement from the United States Supreme Court. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Wood, B. Dan, and Miner P. Marchbanks. 2008. “What Determines How Long Political Appointees Serve?” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18 (3): 375–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yoon, Albert. 2006. “Pensions, Politics, and Judicial Tenure: An Empirical Study of Federal Judges, 1869–2002.” American Law and Economics Review 8 (1): 143–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zorn, Christopher J. W., and Steven R. Van Winkle. 2000. “A Competing Risks Model of Supreme Court Vacancies.” Political Behavior 22:145–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Pérez-Liñán and Araya supplementary material
Download undefined(File)
File 175 KB