Locating U.S. Solicitors General in the Supreme Court's Policy Space

Abstract

The U.S. Solicitor General (SG) is the most direct link between the executive branch and the Supreme Court. Spatial models of the SG's involvement at the Court necessitate locating the SG in the same policy space as the justices. We treat the SG's positions advocated in amicus curiae briefs as equivalent to votes in these cases and employ an item response model that yields facially valid estimates of the locations of the SGs and justices serving during the Eisenhower through Obama administrations. We find that the ideological orientation of the appointing president has a strong effect on the location of the SGs. There is mixed evidence of SGs orienting themselves toward the median justice on the Court, implying that SGs might also serve a second principal in some cases.

Bayesian statistics and modelling

“…The field has gained many interesting insights into psychological and social behaviour through Bayesian methods, and the substantive areas in which this work has been conducted are quite diverse. For example, Bayesian statistics has helped to uncover the role that craving suppression has in smoking cessation 147 , to make population forecasts based on expert opinions 148 , to examine the role that stress related to infant care has in divorce 149 , to examine the impact of the President of the USA's ideology on US Supreme Court rulings 150 and to predict behaviours that limit the intake of free sugars in one's diet 151 . These examples all represent different ways in which Bayesian methodology is captured in the literature.…”

Polarized Pluralism: Organizational Preferences and Biases in the American Pressure System

“…Much of the literature on interest group politics examines groups’ objectives within particular issues (see Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Hojnacki et al 2012), but there has been progress toward more broadly comparable measures of interest group policy preferences. These use a wide variety of data sources, including legislator “report cards” (McKay 2008; Poole 2005), amicus filings at the Supreme Court (Hansford and Depaoli n.d.), campaign contributions (Bonica 2013), and state-level required lobbying disclosures (Thieme Forthcoming). To be able to investigate claims of interest group systemic bias at the federal level, we need a measure capable of assessing the entire interest group system, comparable across disparate issue domains as well as groups with a variety of organizational forms and strategies.…”