Institutions and Equilibrium in the United States Supreme Court

Abstract

Over the last decade the scholarship on judicial politics has increasingly emphasized the strategic aspects of decision making in the United States Supreme Court. This scholarship, however, has struggled with two significant limitations—the restriction to unidimensional policy spaces and the assumption of binary comparisons of alternatives. These two assumptions have the advantage of implying stable, predictable outcomes, but lack a sound theoretical foundation and assume away potentially important aspects of strategic behavior on the Court. In this article, we identify institutional features of the Court that, under certain conditions, allow us to relax these two assumptions without sacrificing stable, predictable policy outcomes. In particular, we formalize the “part-by-part” opinion voting used by the justices, a feature that, together with separable preferences over policy issues, implies stable policy outcomes around the issue-by-issue median of the justices.

Strategic Citations to Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court

“…A related literature analyzes how judicial behavior explains the evolution of legal doctrine (Jacobi and Tiller 2007;Landa and Lax 2009). Other studies provide formal models to explain how the Court's bargaining process influences the policy position embodied in the Court's opinion (Anderson and Tahk 2007;Lax and Cameron 2007).…”

“…The agenda-control model holds that the writer of the Court's majority opinion has disproportionate control over the judicial process (Murphy 1964;Epstein and Knight 1998), although scholars generally recognize that this power is not monopolistic (Maltzman and Wahlbeck 1996b;Rohde and Spaeth 1976;Slotnick 1979). A contrary view, based on the median-voter theorem (Downs 1957), holds that the justice with the median ideology will play the most important role in the process (Anderson and Tahk 2007). Others argue that the median justice in the majority coalition is the key player (Carrubba et al 2011).…”

“…Most research focuses on justices' dichotomous choice of joining or not joining the majority in the case. Anderson and Tahk (2007) go a long way toward addressing this problem by providing a formal model that uses the range of voting options to predict voting and policy outcomes. We build on Anderson and Tahk (2007) by incorporating the range of the justices' options to explain the citations to precedent in the Court's majority opinion.…”

“…Anderson and Tahk (2007) go a long way toward addressing this problem by providing a formal model that uses the range of voting options to predict voting and policy outcomes. We build on Anderson and Tahk (2007) by incorporating the range of the justices' options to explain the citations to precedent in the Court's majority opinion. We assume that during the opinion-writing process, Supreme Court justices behave as strategic decision makers, choosing among their voting options and writing their opinions on the basis of, in part, the expected behavior of their colleagues (Maltzman and Wahlbeck 1996b).…”

“…Using this approach, they have sought to explain how strategic constraints influence such factors as the judge chosen to write the court's opinion (Rohde 1972;Maltzman and Wahlbeck 1996a;Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck 2000), the voting decisions of individual judges, including when they change their original votes (Brenner and Spaeth 1988;Bonneau et al 2007), and the outcomes of cases (Rohde and Spaeth 1976). Political scientists have also attempted to understand the role of ideology, generating a debate between those who believe that the majority-opinion writer's opinion is most important (Murphy 1964;Bonneau et al 2007;Maltzman and Wahlbeck 1996b;Rohde and Spaeth 1976;Slotnick 1979) and those who argue that the median judge is the most influential (Anderson and Tahk 2007).…”