Extreme Dissensus: Explaining Plurality Decisions on the United States Supreme Court

Corley, Pamela C.; Sommer, Udi; Steigerwalt, Amy; Ward, Artemus

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1433742

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(20 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The Rapanos holding set the stage for fragmented case‐ and context‐specific agency responses. Supreme Court plurality decisions are relatively rare, and they give lower courts latitude to decide which (or which combination) of Court opinion(s) should control (Corley, Sommer, Steigerwalt, & Ward, ). Corps and EPA field offices could be expected to vary in their interpretation of Rapanos according to the varying standards of their local lower courts.…”

Section: The Rapanos Casementioning

confidence: 99%

The Influence of Organizations and Institutions on Wetland Policy Stability: The Rapanos Case

Arnold¹,

Fleischman²

2013

Policy Studies Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper uses a case study of wetland regulation in the United States to develop elements of a theory about institutional stability and change in policy processes involving large public organizations. This theoretical approach draws on the Institutional Analysis and Development framework to understand events that are not well explained by other policy theories. Our approach accounts for the theoretically unexpected outcomes of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Rapanos v. United States, which stood to change the way the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulate the filling of wetlands. We propose a typology of institutional types that operate inside public organizations, and use process tracing to show how tacit institutions, those created informally within public organizations, can play key roles in determining the outcomes of policy processes. In the Rapanos case, informal coordination mechanisms enabled regulators and members of the regulated community to preserve substantially the pre-ruling status quo. The key role of these microlevel interactions in shaping the macrolevel behaviors of public organizations underscores the importance of further research investigating how, in similar cases, different behavioral mechanisms interact in often complex and unexpected ways to determine the outcomes of policy processes.

show abstract

Section: The Rapanos Casementioning

confidence: 99%

The Influence of Organizations and Institutions on Wetland Policy Stability: The Rapanos Case

Arnold¹,

Fleischman²

2013

Policy Studies Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In contrast, I define influence as "the act of producing an effect on the behavior of another without the use of coercion, authority, or political control" (Altfeld & Spaeth, 1984, p. 237) and measure it by the number of times each justice cites the concurring and dissenting opinions of her colleagues. By introducing a sound and quantifiable measure of interjustice influence, my findings contribute to a growing literature that has reintroduced the human element to the study of the courts and judicial decision making (Corley, Sommer, Steigerwalt, & Ward, 2010;Maltzman et al, 2000;Meinke & Scott, 2007;Sommer, 2014).…”

mentioning

confidence: 74%

Using Citations to Measure Influence on the Supreme Court

Pryor

2017

American Politics Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

I develop a new measure of interpersonal influence on the U.S. Supreme Court. Following Altfeld and Spaeth, I define influence as “the act of producing an effect on the behavior of another without the use of coercion, authority, or political control.” I propose a measure of influence based on the number of times a justice cites her colleagues’ concurring and dissenting opinions. My analysis proceeds in two stages. First, I verify that this citation-based measure is a valid method of gauging influence. From there, I use this measure to help explain justice behavior in two pivotal stages of the Supreme Court’s decision-making process: oral arguments and opinion assignments. The results demonstrate that a citation-based measure of influence can help explain and predict behavior on the Supreme Court.

show abstract

“…Moreover, using the language of the case syllabus, a shortened description of the case often relied upon in the coding of Supreme Court cases (Spaeth et al, 2012, e.g.,), is exceedingly unlikely to provide an accurate signal of the opinion's sentiment. The latter option, training a classifier based on previously utilized measures such as voting patterns (e.g., Corley et al, 2010;Corley, Steigerwalt and Ward, 2013) or dissenting and concurring behavior (e.g., Walker, Epstein and Dixon, 1988;Caldeira and Zorn, 1998;Hendershot et al, 2013), carries perhaps greater appeal. These previously utilized metrics are, certainly, reflective of divisions of opinion on the Court.…”

Section: Validation: Movie Review Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Corpus-based dictionaries for sentiment analysis of specialized vocabularies

Rice

Zorn

2019

PSRM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Contemporary dictionary-based approaches to sentiment analysis exhibit serious validity problems when applied to specialized vocabularies, but human-coded dictionaries for such applications are often labor-intensive and inefficient to develop. We demonstrate the validity of “minimally-supervised” approaches for the creation of a sentiment dictionary from a corpus of text drawn from a specialized vocabulary. We demonstrate the validity of this approach in estimating sentiment from texts in a large-scale benchmarking dataset recently introduced in computational linguistics, and demonstrate the improvements in accuracy of our approach over well-known standard (nonspecialized) sentiment dictionaries. Finally, we show the usefulness of our approach in an application to the specialized language used in US federal appellate court decisions.

show abstract

Extreme Dissensus: Explaining Plurality Decisions on the United States Supreme Court

Cited by 5 publications

References 38 publications

The Influence of Organizations and Institutions on Wetland Policy Stability: The Rapanos Case

The Influence of Organizations and Institutions on Wetland Policy Stability: The Rapanos Case

Using Citations to Measure Influence on the Supreme Court

Corpus-based dictionaries for sentiment analysis of specialized vocabularies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About