At the heart of attitudinal and strategic explanations judicial behavior is assumption that justices have policy preferences. In this paper we employ Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to fit a Bayesian measurement model ideal points for all serving on U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 through 1999. We are particularly interested in determining what extent change throughout their tenure Court. This important because politics scholars oftentimes invoke preference measures time invariant. To...

Previous methods of analyzing the substance political attention have had to make several restrictive assumptions or been prohibitively costly when applied large‐scale texts. Here, we describe a topic model for legislative speech, statistical learning that uses word choices infer topical categories covered in set speeches and identify specific speeches. Our method estimates, rather than assumes, topics, keywords hierarchical nesting topics. We use examine agenda U.S. Senate from 1997 2004....

Supreme Court Review, a peer-reviewed journal of legal scholarship on the Court, typically features analytical pieces centered particular holdings and doctrines.16.A constitutional scholar would probably not examine an ERISA case, might take account FERC expert ignore habeas case decided contemporaneously.17.This is obviously true most critiques decisions or sets decisions, but it also even political science models that make claims "prediction."These models, discussed infra Part I, regress...

We amass a new, large-scale dataset of newspaper editorials that allows us to calculate fine-grained measures the political positions editorial pages. Collectingandclassifyingover1500editorialsadoptedby25majorUSnewspapers on495SupremeCourtcasesfrom1994to2004,weapplyanitemresponsetheoretic approachtoplacenewspapereditorialboardsonasubstantivelymeaningful—and longvalidated—scaleofpoliticalpreferences.Wevalidatethemeasures,showhow they can be used shed light on permeability wall between news...

We contrast social-structural theories of voting behavior with spatial to explain voter choice in the Netherlands and Great Britain. hypothesize that is best explained by theory voting. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation used estimate multinomial probit (MNP) logit (MNL) models choice, for which we calculate Bayes factors purpose model comparison. find joint social-structural/spatial explanatory Netherlands. Our results indicate MNP outperforms MNL our Dutch sample. In Britain, on...

Political scientists and legal academics have long scrutinized the U.S. Supreme Court's work to understand what motivates justices. Despite significant differences in methodology, both disciplines seek explain decisions by focusing on examining past cases. This retrospective orientation is surprising. In other areas of government, for example, presidential elections congressional decision making, political engage systematic efforts predict outcomes, yet few done this court decisions. Legal...

Does treatment mode matter in studies of the effects candidate race or ethnicity on voting decisions? The assumption implicit most such work is that differences are either small and/or theoretically well understood, so choice how to signal a largely one convenience. But this remains untested. Using nationally representative sample white voting-age citizens and modified conjoint design, we evaluate whether signaling with ethnic labels names results different than ethnically identifiable...

Journal Article Assessing Preference Change on the US Supreme Court Get access Andrew D. Martin, Martin * Washington University School of Law *Washington Law. Email: admartin@wustl.edu. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Kevin M. Quinn Harvard The Law, Economics, and Organization, Volume 23, Issue 2, June 2007, Pages 365–385, https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewm028 Published: 11 May 2007

Most theoretic models of multiparty electoral competition make the assumption that party leaders are motivated to maximize their vote share or seat share. In plurality-rule systems this is a sensible assumption. However, in proportional representation systems, questionable since ability public policy not strictly increasing shares shares. We present model which choose declarations with an eye toward expected outcome coalition bargaining game induced by and parties' beliefs about citizens'...

Jurisprudential regime theory is a legal explanation of decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court that asserts key precedent in an area law fundamentally restructures relationship between case characteristics and outcomes future cases. In this article, we offer multivariate multiple change-point probit model can be used to endogenously test for existence jurisprudential regimes. Unlike previously employed methods, our does so by estimating locations many possible change-points along with...

One of the central predicates legal regulation media ownership is that consolidation reduces substantive viewpoint diversity. Appellate courts and in turn Federal Communications Commission have increasingly demanded evidence for this convergence hypothesis, but extant empirical measures diversity sidestep problem, ignoring diversity, viewpoints, or both. Our article develops offers a finely-tuned, time-varying statistical measure editorial based on new database over 1600 editorials 25 top...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's court-packing plan of 1937 and the "switch in time that saved nine" animate central questions law, politics, history. Did Supreme Court Justice Roberts abruptly switch votes to avert a showdown with Roosevelt? Scholars disagree vigorously about whether Roberts's transformation was gradual anticipated or abrupt unexpected. Using newly collected data from 1931–1940 terms, we contribute historical understanding this episode by providing first quantitative evidence...

Does encouragement help address gender imbalances in technical fields? We present the results of one first and largest randomized controlled trials on topic. Using an applied statistics conference social sciences as our context, we randomly assigned half a pool 3,945 graduate students to receive two personalized emails encouraging them apply (n = 1,976) other nothing 1,969). find robust, positive effect associated with this simple intervention suggestive evidence that women responded more...

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Online ratings data are pervasive, but typically presented in ways that make it difficult for consumers to accurately infer product quality. We propose an easily understood presentation method has the virtue of incorporating a parametric model underlying data. illustrate with new on content quality news outlets, and demonstrate its reliability robustness experiment online users simulation study. Our simple approach is easy implement widely applicable any