Agenda Setting, Issue Priorities and Organizational Maintenance: The US Supreme Court, 1955 to 1994

Abstract

In recent decades, political science has turned to the study of agenda setting as a central aspect of collective decision-making environments. The content of the public agenda -and the issue agendas of political institutions -make significant social change possible. 1 Recent studies suggest that these political institutions are engaged in both competitive relationships, as they identify and pursue both active and latent public issues, and more complex cue-taking relationships. 2 For separated powers, the problems of co-operation and competition with one another are entwined with internal collective decision-making dilemmas.In this study, we focus on the tension within a political institution between agenda setting as a mechanism for internal organizational maintenance, and agenda setting as a consequence of that institution's interaction with other branches of government and the general public. Specifically, we examine agenda setting by the United States Supreme Court, and ask the question of why the Court allocates more or less of its valuable agenda space to one policy issue over others. Our study environment is the policy issue composition of the Court's docket: the Court's attention to criminal justice policy issues relative to other issues. Among the most important powers of the Court is the power to apportion its agenda space among policy issues.Pacelle argues that the Court's agenda-building process, its culling of cases and issues from numerous petitions, may represent the most important sequence of decisions the Court makes. 3 But the Court's docket is a finite agenda space on which some issues are provided with a larger proportion of the Court's attention. 4 Allocating space to an issue can promote the issue's national visibility and legitimacy as an important public concern. 5

Patterns in the politics of drugs and tobacco: The Supreme Court and issue attention by policymakers and the press

“…Caldeira and Wright (1988) show that the Supreme Court is more likely to grant a writ of certiorari when organized interests submit amicus curiae briefs either in favour of or opposing certiorari . Yates et al (2005) show that the percentage of the Supreme Court’s decisions in a year that relate to criminal justice policy are positively associated with how much attention the president gives to criminal justice in the State of the Union address and the proportion of congressional hearings dedicated to the issue. However, in a complex argument that the high court drives its own choices, Baird makes a two-pronged observation on the Court’s agenda (Baird, 2007; Baird and Jacobi, 2009): the Supreme Court depends on litigants’ raising an issue to be able to weigh in on a policy area.…”

Public Opinion and Setting the Agenda on the U.S. Supreme Court

“…In the next section, I argue the same can be said for their consideration of public opinion. Yates, Whitford, and Gillespie (2005) add that justices respond to the issue priorities of the other branches and internal polarization of the Court can affect issue polarization.…”

The Politics of Race, Administrative Appeals, and Medicaid Disenrollment in Tennessee

“…Elected officials, lobbyists, and grassroots coalitions engage in what social scientists call 'political signaling' to distinguish publicly salient policies from less significant issues ( [25]; [7], p. 144]). The Supreme Court, for example, may decide to hear a case based on the agenda-setting priorities of lawmakers or the executive branch [26]. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is an example of a publicly salient issue in which various political coalitions attempted to shape the Supreme Court's position through signaling.…”