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Justice-level heterogeneity in certiorari voting: US Supreme Court October terms 1939, 1968, and 1982

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2021

Gregory A. Caldeira  and
Daniel Lempert Open the ORCID record for Daniel Lempert [Opens in a new window]
Gregory A. Caldeira
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Daniel Lempert*
Affiliation:
SUNY Potsdam, Potsdam, NY, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: dalempert@gmail.com
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Abstract

Although the literature on US Supreme Court agenda-setting is sizable, justice-vote-level multivariate analyses of certiorari are almost exclusively limited to samples of discussed cases from 1986 to 1993. Moreover, these studies have done very little to explore justice-level heterogeneity on certiorari. Here, we address these lacunae by analyzing the predictors of individual justices’ cert votes on all paid cases from the 1939, 1968, and 1982 terms. We find substantial justice-level heterogeneity in the weight that justices place on the standard set of forces shaping the cert vote. We also show that some of this heterogeneity is associated with justices’ experience and ideological extremism, largely in theoretically predicted ways. In closing, we sound a note of caution on drawing conclusions about effects of justice attributes, when the number of justices is relatively small.

Keywords

American politicsjudicial politics
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 793 - 805
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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Caldeira and Lempert Dataset

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QPPL9H
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