Taking and Testing Jurisprudential Regimes Seriously: A Response to Lax and Rader

Abstract

Lax and Rader critique our use of the Chow test in our series of articles on jurisprudential regimes on the grounds that individual justices votes are not statistically independent, which constitutes a violation of assumptions underlying the Chow test. In this response we point out that the Chow tests constituted only one part of our analysis; we also conducted a sensitivity analysis to look at the strength of the Chow tests compared to other sequential splits. Most importantly, we required that the observed statistical patterns of change be theoretically consistent with the legal changes made by the regime changing decisions; we note two areas where we did preliminary analyses that produced statistically significant results, but where those results did not make sense in light of the jurisprudence. We repeat both our Chow tests and individual interaction tests taking into account the clustering of observations. Our reanalysis provides support for some, but not all, of our original results. J ust as there has been careful examination of the underpinnings of the attitudinal model, it is fitting that our work on the relevance of law in Supreme Court decision making be subject to close reexamination. We welcome the analysis undertaken by Lax and Rader and appreciate having the opportunity to respond. 1 The authors have reanalyzed three of the four data sets in our series of articles on jurisprudential regimes with an eye to assessing whether one element of the analysis we conducted, the Chow tests, might have led us to be overconfident in the conclusions that we drew regarding whether the structure of decision making by Supreme Court justices changed in a way consistent with jurisprudential regimes. 2 The thrust of their argument is that because of nonindependence among the votes of the individual justices in the individual cases, the statistical assumptions required for the Chow test are not met, and that a randomization methodology provides a more accurate basis of inference.Lax and Rader focus on only one element of what we did: the Chow tests. As they note, our analysis had three separate components: an assessment of whether the patterns of difference we observed made theoretical sense, the Chow tests, and a comparison of the statistical test for the theoretical break to other alternative breaks (sensitivity analysis). What was perhaps not clear in our presentation is the importance of the first step, which we detail below. The Chow test comparing the two time periods is by no means the definitive element of our examination of whether Supreme Court justices' decisions in an area of law could be characterized as being structured by a jurisprudential regime because many other splits would approximate our hypothesized split. It was not surprising to see statistical differences in the authors' ''odd experiment.'' Various splits could be statistically significant, even without a basis in theory. This was why we conducted the sensitivity analysis to see whether the split we hypothesized was among the strongest sequ...

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