Jeffrey A. Segal

Measuring Issue Salience

The concept of issue salience has figured prominently in many studies of American political life. Long lines of research have taught us that both citizens and political elites may respond differently to issues that are salient to them than to those that are not. Yet analysts making such claims about elite actors face a fundamental problem that their counterparts in mass behavior do not: they cannot survey, say, members of the Supreme Court to ascertain those cases that are especially salient to the justices. Rather, scholars must rely on surrogates for issue salience-surrogates that are fraught with problems and that have led to disparate research results. Accordingly, we offer an alternative approach to measure issue salience for elite actors: the coverage the media affords to a given issue. We argue that this approach has substantial benefits over those employed in the past. Most notably, it provides a reproducible, valid, and transportable method of assessing whether the particular actors under investigation view an issue as salient or not. In making the case for our measure we focus on Supreme Court justices but we are sanguine about its applicability to other political actors

Separation-of-Powers Games in the Positive Theory of Congress and Courts

The hallmark of the new positive theories of the judiciary is that Supreme Court justices will frequently defer to the preferences of Congress when making decisions, particularly in statutory cases in which it is purportedly easy for Congress to reverse the Court. Alternatively, judicial attitudinalists argue that the institutional structures facing the Court allow the justices to vote their sincere policy preferences. This paper compares these sincere and sophisticated models of voting behavior by Supreme Court justices. Using a variety of tests on the votes of Supreme Court justices in statutory cases decided between 1947 and 1992, I find some evidence of sophisticated behavior, but most tests suggest otherwise. Moreover, direct comparisons between the two models unambiguously favor the attitudinal model. I conclude that the justices overwhelmingly engage in rationally sincere behavior.

Predicting Supreme Court Cases Probabilistically: The Search and Seizure Cases, 1962-1981

The overwhelming concensus of Fourth Amendment scholars is that the Supreme Courts sea and seizure cases are a mess. This article proposes that the confusion arises from the manner in which the cases were studied, not from the decisions themselves. A legal model with variables that me the prior justification of the search, the nature of the intrusion, and a few mitigating circumstance used to explain the Courts decisions on the reasonableness of a given search or seizure. The parameters are estimated through probit. The results show that the search and seizure cases are much more ordered than had commonly been believed. Virtually all of the estimates are as expected. Additionally, the Court is shown to act favorably toward the federal government than toward the states. Preliminary analysis suggests the model has predictive as well as explanatory value.

Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Revisited

Segal and Cover (1989) analyzed the content of newspaper editorials to devise measures of the ideological values of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Because their measures came from sources independent of the judicial vote, scholars have widely adopted them. This note updates, backdates, and extends the Segal and Cover research by adding the two Bush appointees and the seven Roosevelt and four Truman nominees whose service extended beyond the start of the Vinson Court. While we find that the ideological values of the Eisenhower through Bush appointees correlate strongly with votes cast in economic and civil liberties cases, the results are less robust for justices appointed by Roosevelt and Truman.

The Influence of Stare Decisis on the Votes of United States Supreme Court Justices

Theory: We test arguments from the legal model claiming that United States Supreme Court justices will follow previously established legal rules even when they disagree with them; i.e., that they are influenced by stare decisis. Hypothesis: Because of the institutional features facing Supreme Court justices, we argue that justices who dissent from or otherwise disagree with Supreme Court precedents established in landmark cases are free not to support those decisions in subsequent cases. Methods: A systematic content analysis of the votes and opinions of dissenting Supreme Court justices in a random sample of landmark decisions and their progeny. Results: Overwhelmingly, Supreme Court justices are not influenced by landmark precedents with which they disagree. We replicate the research for nonlandmark decisions and find similar results. Alone among the justices studied, only Potter Stewart and Lewis Powell show any systematic support for stare decisis at all.

Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Justices: Partisan and Institutional Politics

A presidents most important appointments are to the Supreme Court of the United States. Unlike cabinet officers, the Senate does not routinely confirm Supreme Court justices. To study this phenomenon, I propose four related models of confirmation. The models assume senators to be political persons motivated by both partisan and institutional concerns. The data consist of 138 confirmation decisions, with the parameters estimated by probit. The models explain between 38% and 42% of the variance in confirmation decisions, while predicting 87% and 88% of the cases correctly. Institutional politics are at least as important as partisan politics in predicting decisions.

Supreme Court Justices as Strategic Decision Makers: Aggressive Grants and Defensive Denials on the Vinson Court

We examine strategic certiorari voting among the justices of the Vinson Court, i.e., the extent to which justices consider the relative likelihood of winning on the merits when deciding to grant or deny review. We find strong evidence that justices who wish to affirm carefully consider probable outcomes, but find no evidence that justices who wish to reverse do so. In Perrys (1991) terms, we find that the justices engage in aggressive grants but do not engage in defensive denials.

Supreme Court Justices as Human Decision Makers: An Individual-Level Analysis of the Search and Seizure Cases

This paper applies a fact model of decision making to the justices of the United States Supreme Court. The theoretical model assumes that the justices, as human decision makers, are incapable of considering the hundreds of facts that can affect a particular case. Rather, they rely upon a relative handful of cues to guide their decisions. The model is tested using the votes on search and seizure cases by the justices at the center of the Burger Court: White, Stewart, Powell and Stevens. The results show that a significant proportion of the variation in each justices decisions can be explained by a small number of facts. Finally, it is shown that for these justices and these cases, there is no evidence that judges become more conservative with age.

The Changing Dynamics of Senate Voting on Supreme Court Nominees

A near-universal consensus exists that the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987 triggered a new regime in the Senates voting over presidential nominees—a regime that deemphasizes ethics, competence, and integrity and stresses instead politics, philosophy, and ideology. Nonetheless, this conventional wisdom remains largely untested. In this paper we explore the extent to which the Bork nomination has affected the decisions of U.S. senators. To do so, we modernize, update, and backdate the standard account of confirmation politics offered by Cameron, Cover, and Segal (1990) to cover all candidates for the Supreme Court from Hugo L. Black in 1937 through John G. Roberts, Jr. in 2005. Our results confirm conventional wisdom about the Bork nomination but with two notable caveats. First, while the importance of ideology has reached new heights, the Senates emphasis on this factor had its genesis some three decades earlier, in the 1950s. Second, while ideology is of paramount concern to senators, a candidates professional merit also remains a significant determinant of success in the Senate.

Buyer Beware? Presidential Success through Supreme Court Appointments

One manner in which Presidents attempt to have an enduring policy influence is through the appointment of like-minded justices to the Supreme Court. This article empirically examines Dahls (1957) hypothesis that justices actually support the policy preferences of the Presidents who appoint them. We study concordance with new data for measuring presidential preferences in the domains of social and economic policy and by incorporating the notion of judicial change over time. We measure presidential preferences for the modern Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton, with a survey taken from a random sample of political science scholars who study the Presidency We measure the voting behavior of the Presidents Supreme Court appointees through their votes in civil liberties and economics cases from 1937 to 1994. Presidents appear to be reasonably successful in their appointments in the short run, but justices on average appear to deviate over time away from the Presidents who appointed them.