Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T09:01:33.152Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Tom S. Clark ,
Jeffrey R. Lax  and
Douglas Rice
Tom S. Clark
Affiliation:
Emory University
Jeffrey R. Lax
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Douglas Rice*
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
*
Contact the corresponding author, Douglas Rice, at [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While Supreme Court cases are generally salient or important, some are many degrees more important than others. A wide range of theoretical and empirical work throughout the study of judicial politics implicates this varying salience. Some work considers salience a variable to be explained, perhaps with judicial behavior the explanatory factor. The currently dominant measure of salience is the existence of newspaper coverage of a decision, but decisions themselves are an act of judicial politics. Because this coverage measure is affected only after a decision is announced, using it limits the types of inferences we can draw about salience. We develop a measure of latent salience, one that builds on existing work, but that also explicitly incorporates and models predecision information. This measure has the potential to ameliorate concerns of causal inference, put research findings on sounder footing, and add to our understanding of judicial behavior.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Spring 2015 , pp. 37 - 65
Copyright
© 2015 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

We are indebted to many research assistants who over the years helped us collect initial data for this project, many of whom, we can only infer, perished in the process. We thank Charles Cameron, Lee Epstein, Matthew Hall, John Kastellec, Ben Lauderdale, Drew Linzer, Kelly Rader, Phil Schrodt, and Chris Zorn for helpful comments and discussions.

References

Bailey, Michael A., Brian Kamoie, and Forrest Maltzman. 2005. “Signals from the Tenth Justice: The Political Role of the Solicitor General in Supreme Court Decision Making.” American Journal of Political Science 49 (1): 72–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baird, Vanessa A. 2004. “The Effect of Politically Salient Decisions on the US Supreme Court’s Agenda.” Journal of Politics 66 (3): 755–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biskupic, Joan, and Elder Witt. 1997. Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press.Google Scholar
Black, Ryan, Rachel Schutte, and Timothy Johnson. 2013. “Trying to Get What You Want: Heresthetical Maneuvering and U.S. Supreme Court Decision Making.” Political Research Quarterly 66 (4): 819–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Ryan, Maron Sorenson, and Timothy Johnson. 2013. “Toward an Actor-Based Measure of Supreme Court Case Salience: Information-Seeking and Engagement during Oral Arguments.” Political Research Quarterly 66 (4): 804–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caldeira, Gregory A., and Wright, John R.. 1988. “Organized Interests and Agenda Setting in the U.S. Supreme Court.” American Political Science Review 82 (4): 1109–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Canes-Wrone, Brandice, and Scott de Marchi. 2002. “Presidential Approval and Legislative Success.” Journal of Politics 64:491–509.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Paul M. Jr., 2008a. “The Consistency of Judicial Choice.” Journal of Politics 70 (3): 861–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Paul M. Jr., 2008b. Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Todd, and Chris Cooper. 2011. “Case Salience and Media Coverage of Supreme Court Decisions: Toward a New Measure.” Political Research Quarterly 65 (2): 396–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corley, Pamela C. 2008. “The Supreme Court and Opinion Content: The Influence of Parties’ Briefs.” Political Research Quarterly 61 (3): 468–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corley, Pamela C., Collins, Paul M. Jr., and Bryan Calvin. 2011. “Lower Court Influence on U.S. Supreme Court Opinion Content.” Journal of Politics 73 (1): 31–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cross, Frank B., Spriggs, James F. II, Johnston, Timothy R., and Wahlbeck, Paul J.. 2010. “Citations in the U.S. Supreme Court: An Empirical Study of Their Use and Significance.” University of Illinois Law Review (2): 489–575.Google Scholar
Edwards, George, William Mitchell, and Reed Welch. 1995. “Explaining Presidential Approval: The Significance of Issue Salience.” American Journal of Political Science 39:108–34.Google Scholar
Epstein, Lee, and Segal, Jeffrey A.. 2000. “Measuring Issue Salience.” American Journal of Political Science 44 (1): 66–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finkel, Jenny Rose, Trond Grenager, and Christopher Manning. 2005. “Incorporating Non-local Information into Information Extraction Systems by Gibbs Sampling.” In 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2005), 363–70. Stroudsberg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Gerner, Deborah, Philip Schrodt, Ronald Francisco, and Judith Weddle. 1994. “Machine Coding of Event Data Using Regional and International Sources.” International Studies Quarterly 38:91–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gill, Jeff. 2008. Bayesian Methods: A Social and Behavioral Sciences Approach. London: Chapman & Hall/CRC.Google Scholar
Hall, Kermit L. 1999. The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hansford, Thomas G., and Spriggs, James F. II. 2006. The Politics of Precedent on the US Supreme Court. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoekstra, Valerie J. 2003. Public Reaction to Supreme Court Decisions. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackman, Simon. 2000. “Estimation and Inference via Bayesian Simulation: An Introduction to Markov Chain Monte Carlo.” American Journal of Political Science 44 (2): 375–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Gary, and Will Lowe. 2003. “An Automated Information Extraction Tool for International Conflict with Performance as Good as Human Coders: A Rare Events Design.” International Organization 57:617–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lax, Jeffrey R., and Cameron, Charles M.. 2007. “Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the U.S. Supreme Court.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 23 (2): 276–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maltzman, Forrest, Spriggs, James F. II, and Wahlbeck, Paul J.. 2000. Crafting Law on the Supreme Court: The Collegial Game. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mayhew, David E. 1974. Congress: The Electoral Connection. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
McAtee, Andrea, and McGuire, Kevin T.. 2007. “Lawyers, Justices, and Issue Salience: When and How Do Legal Arguments Affect the US Supreme Court?” Law and Society Review 41 (2): 259–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGuire, Kevin T. 1998. “Explaining Executive Success in the U.S. Supreme Court.” Political Research Quarterly 51 (2): 505–26.Google Scholar
Niemi, Richard, and Larry Bartels. 1985. “New Measures of Issue Salience: An Evaluation.” Journal of Politics 47 (4): 1212–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Owens, Ryan J., and Wedeking, Justin P.. 2011. “Justices and Legal Clarity: Analyzing the Complexity of U.S. Supreme Court Opinions.” Law and Society Review 45 (4): 1027–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plummer, Martyn. 2003. “JAGS: A Program for Analysis of Bayesian Graphical Models Using Gibbs Sampling.” http://mcmc-jags.sourceforge.net.Google Scholar
Plummer, Martyn. 2011. rjags: Bayesian Graphical Models Using MCMC. R package vers. 3–5. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rjags.Google Scholar
Quinn, Kevin, Burt Monroe, Michael Colaresi, Michael Crespin, and Dragomir Radev. 2010. “How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs.” American Journal of Political Science 54:209–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Development Core Team. 2009. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.R-project.org.Google Scholar
Segal, Jeffrey A. 1988. “Amicus Curiae Briefs by the Solicitor General during the Warren and Burger Courts: A Research Note.” Western Political Quarterly 41 (1): 135–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Segal, Jeffrey A., and Cover, Albert D.. 1989. “Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices.” American Political Science Review 83 (2): 557–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Segal, Jeffrey A., and Spaeth, Harold J.. 2002. The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spaeth, Harold J., Lee Epstein, Ruger, Theodore W., Whittington, Keith E., Segal, Jeffrey A., and Martin, Andrew D.. 2012. The Supreme Court Database. http://supremecourtdatabase.org.Google Scholar
Spiegelhalter, D. J., N. G. Best, B. P. Carlin, and A. Van der Linde. 2002. “Bayesian Measures of Model Complexity and Fit (with Discussion).” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, ser. B, 64 (4): 583–616.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vining, Richard, and Teena Wilhelm. 2011. “Measuring Case Salience in State Courts of Last Resort.” Political Research Quarterly 64 (3): 559–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wohlfarth, Patrick C. 2009. “The Tenth Justice? Consequences of Politicization in the Solicitor General’s Office.” Journal of Politics 71 (1): 224–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar