Case Salience and Media Coverage of Supreme Court Decisions: Toward a New Measure

Collins, Todd A.; Cooper, Christopher A.

doi:10.1177/1065912911404565

Cited by 21 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Scholars have frequently measured importance to political actors by looking to media-based measures ðEpstein and Segal 2000; Canes-Wrone and de Marchi 2002; Collins and Cooper 2011;Vining and Wilhelm 2011Þ, as media-based measures offer exogenous and contemporaneous assessments of political discussion. However, we argue that the weight the justice places on a case is not best captured by media coverage at a particular point in time, but rather across the life of the case.…”

Section: I M E a S U R I N G S A L I E N C Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases

2015

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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.

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Section: I M E a S U R I N G S A L I E N C Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases

2015

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“…Each vignette summarized the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District of Nevada (). Hiibel scored a two out of eight on Collins and Cooper's () expanded salience index because the case received news coverage in both the New York Times and Washington Post the day after the Court handed down the decision (see Greenhouse ; Lane ). Hiibel is a criminal procedure case; this issue area is particularly useful given our research question because it maps consistently onto a traditional left–right spectrum.…”

Section: Experimental Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of Policy Outcomes

Boddery¹,

Moyer²,

Yates³

2019

Law Soc Rev

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The manner in which political institutions convey their policy outcomes can have important implications for how the public views institutions' policy decisions. This paper explores whether the way in which the U.S. Supreme Court communicates its policy decrees affects how favorably members of the public assess its decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether attributing a decision to the nation's High Court or to an individual justice influences the public's agreement with the Court's rulings. Using an experimental design, we find that when a Supreme Court outcome is ascribed to the institution as a whole, rather than to a particular justice, people are more apt to agree with the policy decision. We also find that identifying the gender of the opinion author affects public agreement under certain conditions. Our findings have important implications for how public support for institutional policymaking operates, as well as the dynamics of how the Supreme Court manages to accumulate and maintain public goodwill.

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“…This more nuanced measure allows us to account for some of the objections lodged against the Epstein and Segal ð2000Þ measure of media coverage ðsee Maltzman and Wahlbeck 2003;Collins and Cooper 2012;Sill et al 2013Þ as well as get a more complete picture of the levels of media coverage an individual case can garner. We note that we are not interested in salience as a latent construct, as many of these works are, and thus are agnostic to the debate about whether case salience is best measured using media-based approaches ðsee, e.g., Clark, Lax, and Rice 2015Þ or actor-based observational data ðsee Black, Sorenson, and Johnson 2013Þ.…”

Section: O D E L I N G M E D I a C O V E R Ag E O F S U P R E M E Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Jeremiad or Weapon of Words?

Bryan

Ringsmuth

2016

J. law courts

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Unable to directly control the policy articulated by the Supreme Court, dissenting justices are faced with the challenge of finding alternative ways to pursue their policy goals. We argue that one strategy available to them is to use their power over the language of a dissenting opinion to increase the media attention paid to a case. Our results show that cases with negative dissents attract more media coverage, which creates a variety of mechanisms through which a dissenter’s policy preferences could be realized, such as inducing Congress to take action, influencing public debate on the issue, and provoking further litigation. This finding ultimately suggests that dissenters, while disadvantaged, are not powerless to affect legal policy.

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Case Salience and Media Coverage of Supreme Court Decisions: Toward a New Measure

Cited by 21 publications

References 24 publications

Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases

Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases

Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of Policy Outcomes

Jeremiad or Weapon of Words?

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