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The premise of this paper is that while the comparative study of courts can address some vitally important questions in judicial politics, these gains will not be secured without a valid and reliable measure of judge preferences that is comparable within and across courts. Party affiliation of judges is a commonly used but weak substitute that suffers from pronounced equivalence problems. We develop a contextually based, party‐adjusted surrogate judge ideology measure (PAJID) and subject this measure to an extensive array of validity tests. We also consider the measure's stability in predicting judge behavior over the course of the judicial career. As the results illustrate, PAJID offers a valid, stable measure of judge preferences in state supreme courts that is demonstrably superior to party affiliation in analyses of judicial decision‐making across areas of law and across 52 state high courts.

This essay places state supreme courts in state politics by tracking some of the major lines of research on these important institutions, documenting the importance of state supreme courts, and illustrating important variations among state supreme courts on a host of factors, including docket composition, the exercise of judicial review, litigant patterns, and turnover rates. Through analyses of original data on separation-of-powers relationships in the abortion controversy, it also provides a brief empirical demonstration of how courts influence and are influenced by the political and policy processes operating in the states, and how comparative research helps resolve fundamental controversies in political science. We conclude that there is a remarkable and unfortunate asymmetry between the political importance of state supreme courts and the attention given to them by the research community. Moreover, by capitalizing on the analytical advantages of comparative state judicial politics scholarship, scholars will be able to solve some of the most complex puzzles in the study of state politics.

We offer a theory about public policy adoption that depicts a game between state supreme courts and state policymakers. We hypothesize that court ideological hostility or friendliness operates to discourage or encourage policy enactment, with the likelihood of subsequent court intervention magnifying the relationship. To test the argument we examine the influence of court ideology on the enactment of state abortion and death penalty laws since the 1970s. Empirical analyses provide strong support for our theory, indicating that court ideological hostility or friendliness significantly influenced state abortion and death penalty policy enactments. In addition, the likelihood of court intervention conditioned this relationship, with the most pronounced effect occurring where subsequent court review was mandatory. The findings reveal courts exert important preemptive influence on law without hearing a case. This facet of judicial influence expands the traditional view of actors involved in the policymaking process.

I ask whether the economic development strategies pursued by state governments to stimulate growth have unintended consequences for the well-being of the citizenry, particularly income distribution. Pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis was employed to empirically evaluate the effects of state economic development strategy on the distribution of income in the American states for the 1976 to 1994 period. Results demonstrate that the economic development strategy state governments take has differential effects on the distribution of income. States that adopt demand-side policies (promoting research and development, technology, and exportation) more than traditional supply-side policies (offering tax abatements and capital subsidies) are associated with more equitable distributions of income. Although the results indicate that states have the power to reduce income inequalities by employing more demand-oriented economic development strategies, the substantive impact is quite small, and the frequency with which states do this is rare when compared to the use of supply-side tactics.

We examine career patterns of 257 associate state supreme court justices and the conditions under which some of these justices were elevated to chief justice. We posit that recruitment of chief justice is used to advance judges’ personal policy preferences in some instances, but in other states recruitment of this position is used to appease actors who can punish judges for objectionable decisions. We further hypothesize that chief justice control over opinion assignment shapes the recruitment process and the probability any given justice will become chief justice. Results show that the recruitment process leads associate justices to choose chief justices based on policy goals when this position is afforded the power to control opinion assignment. In these states, the median member of the court has the greatest probability of becoming chief justice. Alternatively, when the chief justice lacks opinion assignment control, institutional goals influence the decisions made by associate justices.

On December 12, 2000, for the first time in America's history a court of law determined the outcome of a presidential election. Before an anxious citizenry, the United States Supreme Court issued the decision that would ultimately give George W. Bush the presidency, if not absolute victory. Remarkably, the U.S. Supreme Court justices were not the only jurists pulled into the fray. In numerous lawsuits, several Florida state courts rendered decisions that figured prominently in the 2000 presidential election.

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