Voting Behavior on the United States Courts of Appeals Revisited

Abstract

In an earlier study of voting behavior of U.S. appeals courts judges, attitudinal patterns were investigated along with an analysis of the relationship of judges' backgrounds to their decisions. In this revisit, the earlier findings were treated as hypotheses and tested with a new case population covering a subsequent and longer time period. In all, 2,115 cases decided nonunanimously were coded on one or more issues. Most cases could be classified under ten broad issue categories which were then utilized for most of the analyses. Although the research design was similar to that of the earlier study, a wider variety of methods was employed including nonparametric and parametric intercorrelations of voting behavior on the ten issues and stepwise multiple regression and partial correla-tion analyses of seven background variables and their relationships to voting behavior on the issues. The principal findings were similar to those found earlier but it was possible to map voting behavior with some-what more precision and to uncover some unexpected relationships such as those concerning the potency of the age variable particularly for voting on political liberalism issues.

Judicial Decision Making In the Supreme Court of Canada: Updating the Personal Attribute Model

“…This score is simply the percentage of decisions supporting the liberal position cast by the judge in nonunanimous decisions in the period studied for the indicated policy area. Since the classic analysis of Pritchett~1948!, scholars have frequently used the presence of dissent on appellate courts as an "objective" indicator that judges were relatively free to vote their preferences without external constraint from legal or political forces~see Goldman, 1975!. That is, the presence of dissent is an objective, easily accessible indicator that legitimate decisional alternatives were open to the judges. Such a measure is almost certainly under-inclusive; a very high percentage of the nonunanimous cases can be expected to be among those in which judges were relatively free to vote their policy preferences, but it will not capture all cases in which judges had legitimate decisional alternatives~see Atkins and Greene, 1976!.…”

The Religious Right in Court: The Decision Making of Christian Evangelicals in State Supreme Courts

“…The best indicator that is readily available for most state supreme court judges is political party affiliation. A wide variety of studies suggests that party identification provides a rough indicator of the ideology of appellate court judges and that Democratic judges (coded 1) are generally more liberal than Republican judges (coded 0) in most issue areas of civil liberties and economic regulation (Goldman 1975 6This classification is taken from Kellstedt and Green 1993. Judges whose religion could not be ascertained or whose religious affiliation did not fit one of these four categories (e.g., Russian Orthodox) were excluded from analysis.…”

Indonesia After Joko Widodo: The Increase in Politics and Public Administration

“…Secondly, Trust in People is a very basic fundamental value to answer how the great expectations of society before the election are answered by Jokowi with his leadership after one year (Goldman, 1966;Tao, Su, Sun, & Lu, 2011;Wang, 2016). It is possible that the decline of trust in society to Jokowi will bring disaster to the climate of democracy in Indonesia because high expectations will bring high disappointment at the same time.…”