Studies of policy making by courts need to examine the actual policy adopted in the majority opinion rather than studying votes. The authors examine the responsiveness of state supreme courts to precedents announced by the US Supreme Court by examining their treatment of the precedents in their opinions, testing the utility of precedent vitality versus the impact of ideological preferences. They find that the vitality of Supreme Court precedent is a strong predictor of the way in which the precedent is treated by state courts, even after controlling for ideological distance and institutional features of state court systems.

This article examines the link between elections and the representational behavior of senators by considering whether ideological congruence with state preferences impacts vote shares on Election Day. We advance the literature on electoral accountability by proposing a more refined theoretical and empirical assessment of congruence with constituent preferences. Additionally, our analysis focuses on the effect of divergence in the Senate, which has been subject to significantly less attention than the House, and examines all elections to the upper chamber involving incumbents from 1960-2004. We find that measures of ideological divergence that are conditioned on the underlying ideological preferences of state constituencies significantly improve on existing measures, and that senators who are out of step with their state do in fact suffer at the polls.

We argue that given finite resources to review the large number of lower court decisions, Supreme Court justices should primarily be interested in aggregate responses to their precedents. We offer a theory in which the US Supreme Court drives aggregate responses to its decisions by signaling the utility of its precedents to judges on the lower courts. Specifically, we argue that lower court judges have a greater propensity to rely on a Supreme Court decision when the justices explicitly direct a lower court to consider a formally argued decision in its summary decisions. Our results demonstrate that such signals significantly increase the frequency with which the lower courts adopt the precedents of the US Supreme Court. We corroborate the causality of these links through qualitative analyses, distance matching methods, and simultaneous sensitivity analysis. Our study offers new and important insights on judicial impact and decision-making behavior in the American courts.

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We offer a novel theory on Supreme Court impact that makes several key contributions beyond existing accounts. We argue that policy-oriented justices are particularly attentive to the impact of their precedents within the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We provide a framework in which both Supreme Court and circuit-level influences drive U.S. Courts of Appeals responses to the Supreme Court’s precedents. Principally, we argue that the Supreme Court’s use of its summary decisions, which explicitly reference its formally argued decisions, increase circuit court utility of the High Court’s precedents. We test our predictions using new data on appeals court responses to the Supreme Court’s precedents. The empirical results support our account and shed new light on the hierarchical dynamic within the American federal judiciary.