Justin Wedeking

How the Supreme Court Alters Opinion Language to Evade Congressional Review

We argue that actors can attempt to shield their policy choices from unfavorable review by crafting them in a manner that will increase the costs necessary for supervisory institutions to review them. We apply this theory to the US Supreme Court and demonstrate how justices strategically obfuscate the language of majority opinions in the attempt to circumvent unfavorable review from a politically hostile Congress. The results suggest that Supreme Court justices can and do alter the language of their opinions to raise the costs of legislative review and thereby protect their decisions.

Predicting Drift on Politically Insulated Institutions: A Study of Ideological Drift on the United States Supreme Court

We examine whether policymakers can predict whether nominees to the Supreme Court will drift ideologically. We analyze the pre-nomination speeches, articles, and separate opinions published by every justice who served at least ten years on the Court. Our data show that we can indeed predict whether a nominee will drift ideologically once on the Court.

U.S. Supreme Court Opinions and their Audiences

This book is the first study specifically to investigate the extent to which U.S. Supreme Court justices alter the clarity of their opinions based on expected reactions from their audiences. The authors examine this dynamic by creating a unique measure of opinion clarity and then testing whether the Court writes clearer opinions when it faces ideologically hostile and ideologically scattered lower federal courts; when it decides cases involving poorly performing federal agencies; when it decides cases involving states with less professionalized legislatures and governors; and when it rules against public opinion. The data shows the Court writes clearer opinions in every one of these contexts, and demonstrates that actors are more likely to comply with clearer Court opinions.

Connecting with the Courts: Online Access to State Judicial Systems

ABSTRACT Access to the legal system is critical in any democracy. In this article, we extend past research by exploring a new and twenty-first century dimension of access—namely, access to a states court system through its judiciary website. Using data from all fifty state judiciary websites, we find that online access is associated with the complexity and efficiency of the court system and, to a lesser extent, state-level Internet penetration and the size of the legal community, while partisan control generally has a modest or null effect. This suggests that practical or administrative considerations are more influential than political considerations when establishing online access to state courts.

Accounting for Temporal Trends in Party Affect: Negativity versus Neutrality

Abstract This paper investigates whether affect toward the two major parties has shifted in a negative or neutral direction over the past half‐century based on several systematic tests that structure citizens by their type of party affect: whether they feel positively about both parties (optimists), negatively about both (pessimists), neutral toward both (indifferent), or positive toward one party and negative toward the other (partisans). Using ANES data from 1952 to 2004, with feeling thermometers and likes/dislikes about the parties as measures of party affect, we conduct several tests and find that changes in mean party affect toward the parties, as well as changes in the distribution of individuals across different types of party affect, support the negativity theory. Additionally, our results indicate that the role of the parties in the political environment has changed, with citizens structuring their affect toward the parties differently.

Disagreeable Rhetoric and the Prospect of Public Opposition: Opinion Moderation on the U.S. Supreme Court:

Elite rhetoric is an important aspect of democracy, and understanding why elites alter their rhetorical tone is vital to understanding the nature of public–elite interaction. In this paper, we identify the conditions under which insulated elites respond to public opinion by changing the amount of disagreeable rhetoric they emphasize. We examine Supreme Court opinions and theorize that the majority limits the use of disagreeable rhetoric—language with harsh, unpleasant, or negative connotations—in salient cases with the intention of dulling public opposition to rulings. We test our expectations on two levels, the first using a broad measure of public mood on a large sample of cases and the second using a small sample with issue-specific public opinion measures. We find that as public opinion diverges from the Court, the majority tones down its disagreeable rhetoric, but only in salient cases.