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Agenda Setting and Attention to Precedent in the US Federal Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

JBrandon Duck-Mayr ,
Thomas G. Hansford  and
James F. Spriggs II
James F. Spriggs II
Affiliation:
Washington University in St. Louis, USA
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Abstract

To what degree is judicial agenda setting top-down or bottom-up? Existing studies lack evidence of the frequency or magnitude of these two processes. We conceptualize the judicial agenda as the legal questions/rules receiving judicial attention, measure it using citations to Supreme Court opinions, and estimate vector autoregression models to identify how each level of court initiates or responds to variation in attention to precedent at other levels of the judiciary. The Supreme Court exerts some top-down control, but agenda setting is more often bottom-up, revealing lower courts are more integral to setting the federal judicial agenda than previously understood.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall 2021 , pp. 233 - 260
Copyright
© 2021 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

Spriggs recognizes funding from the National Science Foundation (Law and Social Science, SES-0550451). A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2013 annual conference of the American Political Science Association. Contact the corresponding author, James F. Spriggs II, at [email protected].

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