Anna Harvey

Pulling Punches: Congressional Constraints on the Supreme Court's Constitutional Rulings, 1987-2000

To date, no study has found evidence that the U.S. Supreme Court is constrained by Congress in its constitutional decisions. We addressed the selection bias inherent in previous studies with a statute-centered, rather than a case-centered, analysis, following all congressional laws enacted between 1987 and 2000. We uncovered considerable congressional constraint in the Courts constitutional rulings. In particular, we found that the probability that the Rehnquist Court would strike a liberal congressional law rose between 47% and 288% as a result of the 1994 congressional elections, depending on the legislative model used.

Ducking Trouble: Congressionally-Induced Selection Bias in the Supreme Court's Agenda

Existing studies of congressional influence on Supreme Court decision making have largely failed to recognize the fact that the Court has a discretionary docket. We model the effects of congressional preferences on the certiorari decision and find strong evidence that the Courts constitutional agenda is systematically influenced by Congress. The Courts docket is significantly less likely to contain cases wherein there are large congressionally induced deviations between what the Court would like to do, and what it can do in its final rulings. This selection bias in the Courts docket can lead to considerable uncertainty in estimating the effects of congressional constraint on the Courts final decisions, including a failure to properly reject the null hypothesis of no constraint.

Votes Without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics, 1920-1970

1. The legacy of female disenfranchisement 2. The logic of policy change: voters, organizations, and institutions 3. Testing competing hypotheses: pre- and post- suffrage in New York State, 1909-20 4. The national race to mobilize women, 1917-32 5. One step forward, two steps back: women in the parties, 1917-32 6. The re-emergence of policy and party benefits for women, 1970-present References.

Electoral Institutions and the Evolution of Partisan Conventions, 1880-1940

This article examines variation in partisanship levels across the United States between 1880 and 1940 and suggests that the introduction of three electoral laws in this time period—party registration, primaries and secret ballots—can explain the geographic variation in partisanship levels across the United States during this era. Specifically, the article argues that the introduction of party registration increased the observability of partisan behavior; and this, in turn, increased partisanship strength in the states in which party registration was introduced. Conversely, primaries and secret ballots reduced the observability of partisan actions, which consequently weakened the level of partisanship. The authors test their theoretical predictions on aggregate levels of split-ticket voting across the United States between 1880 and 1940. The authors find considerable support for their predictions in time-series cross-section (TSCS) estimates of the effects of electoral institutions on levels of partisanship across states, support undiminished after corrections for endogeneity and selection bias.

The Economic Origins of Entrenched Judicial Review

This article proposes a new explanation for the origins of entrenched judicial review, or judicial review supported by supermajority constitutional amendment requirements. The explanation is based on ex ante levels of economic inequality: Where economic inequality is higher, economic elites have more to lose from the advent of majority rule. These elites will have both greater incentives and greater ability to resist or check institutions responsive to popular majorities. We may then be more likely to see the adoption of less democratically responsive institutions, like entrenched judicial review, where more unequal wealth and income distributions are threatened by majority rule. The theory is consistent with the qualitative historical record from several former British colonies, including that of the United States. It also finds considerable support in an econometric analysis of the presence of entrenched judicial review in the first year of continuous democracy for those former European colonies that had become democracies by 2008, where pre-independence European mortality rates are used as a proxy for pre-independence economic inequality. These findings suggest that the adoption of entrenched judicial review in democracies may have been motivated at least in part because of its anticipated protection for higher levels of economic inequality.

Women, Policy, and Party, 1920–1970: A Rational Choice Approach

The 1970s saw a dramatic increase in the success rate of U.S. womens organizations pursuing congressional support of legislation designed to remove barriers to the progress of women in economic, political, and social arenas. While womens organizations, including both older organizations such as the National Federation of Business and Professional Womens Clubs (NFBPWC) and newer organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), had lobbied Congress before 1970, that year saw their first major lobbying success. House passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1970 was followed in 1972 by full congressional passage of the ERA and Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act (prohibiting sex discrimination in education), the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Womens Educational Equity Act in 1974, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the (unprecedented) congressional extension of the ratification period for the ERA in 1978, as well as a host of measures prohibiting sex discrimination in federal programs. The legislative success of womens organizations has continued, albeit with some fits and starts, into the 1980s and 1990s with pension equity reform, child support enforcement legislation, child care subsidies, and parental leave legislation as important examples. As documented by numerous scholars, in all these cases womens organizations provided the primary lobbying support for the successful legislation.