Agenda Control, the Median Justice, and the Majority Opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court

Agenda Setting in the Supreme Court: The Collision of Policy and Jurisprudence

“…Policy maximization-the outcome mode-is a strong predictor of Supreme Court agenda setting. This finding provides an important addition to Caldeira, Wright, and Zorn (1999) and suggests the value of empirically testing theoretical models of judicial behavior (Bonneau et al 2007).…”

“…Scholars have offered a host of competing interpretations for where they think the Court sets policy. The model we employ here, the ''Bench Median model'' (Hammond, Bonneau, and Sheehan 2005;Bonneau et al 2007) reflects the median voter theorem and argues that after a free competition among the justices over draft opinions, the median's position wins out. The equilibrium result is that no matter who drafts the majority opinion, its policy reflects the preferences of the median justice.…”

“…The equilibrium result is that no matter who drafts the majority opinion, its policy reflects the preferences of the median justice. Given the theoretical appeal of the median voter theorem, as well as the recent empirical support for the Bench Median model at the merits stage (Bonneau et al 2007), we are comfortable measuring the predicted policy of the Court's merits decision this way. Accordingly, we measure the predicted policy location of the Court's merits decision as the median justice's ideal point.…”

“…While Bonneau et al (2007) found slightly stronger results for a second model that turns on the preferences of the opinion writer, such a model is unworkable at the agenda-setting stage because nearly all the justices lack a priori knowledge of who will assign and write the Court's opinion (Hammond, Bonneau, and Sheehan 2005, 224).…”

Estimating Vote-Specific Preferences from Roll-Call Data Using Conditional Autoregressive Priors

“…Opinion assignment on the Supreme Court is one of the longest-studied phenomena in the A class of formal and informal models of opinion-writing predicts that who writes the opinion could matter greatly for the content of the opinion (Lax and Cameron 2007;Bonneau, Hammond, Maltzman and Wahlbeck 2007;Maltzman, Spriggs and Wahlbeck 2000). We refer to these models of bargaining and opinion assignment as "author influence models" models and contrast them with "monopoly models," which predict that opinion authorship does not matter.…”