Suchergebnisse

This study examines how ten interest groups used electronic mail to mobilize their supporters in response to the Supreme Court nominations of John G. Roberts, Jr., Harriet Miers, and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. The effects of group characteristics and goals, the dynamics of the confirmation process, and prior behavior are evaluated. Logit results reveal that group traits and preferences influence the likelihood of requests for action and donations. Funding requests were also conditioned by the stage of the process. The findings show that interest groups use Supreme Court turnover as an opportunity for political advocacy and organizational maintenance.

Objective. This article uses Cox proportional hazards models to explain departures from the U.S. Courts of Appeals from 1954–2004. I argue that reforms to pension eligibility and financial incentives in 1984 extended opportunities for voluntary departures and strategic behavior, and that reasons for quitting (whether political, personal, or institutional) differed among types of departures and over time.Methods. The data represent all judge‐years from 1954–2004. Both the full period and 1954–1983 and 1984–2004 subperiods are examined.Results. The effects of political factors are limited to partial retirements and suggest judges' recognition of contentious confirmation politics since the 1980s. Personal and institutional variables dominate outright departures.Conclusions. Explanations for departures from the circuit bench differ both by type and over time. Scholars and policymakers should refine arguments regarding judicial turnover and its causes.

Administering Justice examines the leadership role of chief justices in the American states, including how those duties require chief justices to be part of the broader state political environment. Vining and Wilhelm focus extensively on the power of chief justices as public spokespersons, legislative liaisons, and reform leaders. In contrast to much existing research on chief justices in the states, this study weighs their extrajudicial responsibilities rather than intracourt leadership. By assessing the content of State of the Judiciary remarks delivered over a period of sixty years, Vining and Wilhelm are able to analyze the reform agendas advanced by chief justices and determine what factors influence the likelihood of success. These analyses confirm that chief justices engage with state politics in meaningful ways and that reactions to their proposals are influenced by ideological congruence with other political elites and the scope of their requests. Administering Justice also examines the chief justice position as an institution, provides a collective profile of its occupants, and surveys growing diversity among court leaders.

In the 1980s and 1990s, supporters of Supreme Court nominees tended to characterize their views in non-ideological terms while opponents relied more on ideological justifications. Since then, the judicial appointment process has been increasingly entangled with partisan conflict. Given the heightened focus on nominees' ideological preferences, we expect that citizens are now more likely to rely on political over apolitical justifications, even if they support the nominee. We use data from a telephone survey in 2017 after the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to test this proposition. We find that contemporary citizens rely more frequently on political justifications for their support of nominees than then they did in the Reagan-Bush era. Opponents remain more likely to invoke political orientations, but the disparity has declined. The findings reveal both change and continuity in citizens' evaluations of Supreme Court nominees.

Governors are generally the best-known figures in state politics. They have many roles, including service as political leaders in their states. One aspect of this role is the promotion of their favored policies and electoral candidates. We examine why governors endorse candidates for state-level office using data from partisan and nonpartisan state supreme court elections from 1999 to 2008. We examine both decisions to endorse and whether endorsements influence electoral results. Our findings indicate that a governor's decision to endorse a candidate is the product of pragmatic considerations and executive resources. We also conclude that governors' endorsements have a significant effect on electoral outcomes.

Scholars recognize that both citizens and elites may alter their behavior in response to salient stimuli. Epstein and Segal's (2000) measure of salience for the United States Supreme Court provided a valid and reproducible way to assess the political salience of cases. No comparable measure exists for state high courts. The authors introduce a measure of case salience for state supreme courts that is comprehensive and similar to the Epstein-Segal measure. We discuss the utility of this measure, compare it to several alternatives, provide descriptive statistics, and discuss the relationship between case salience and judicial behavior in state supreme courts.

AbstractWe examine how institutional selection procedures affect the ideology of state supreme court chief justices. We argue that institutional selection methods empower those charged with choosing chief justices to select court leaders who reflect their own preferences, and we test this theory using data from all 50 American states from 1970 to 2017. Our results show that states that use popular elections to select chief justices tend to produce court leaders whose preferences reflect the electorate, and states that use commission-assisted elite appointment tend to produce chief justices whose preferences mirror those of political elites. While we find that peer election systems produce leaders with preferences similar to median court preferences, court preferences are also associated with other methods of chief justice selection.

ObjectivesWe examine the conditions under which the Chief Justice of the United States achieves congressional approval for his requests for institutional reforms to the federal courts. Specifically, we investigate whether legislators are more likely to enact these requests when they are limited in scope and members of Congress are similar ideologically to the chief justice or federal judiciary.MethodsOur analysis uses the chief justice's Year‐End Report on the Federal Judiciary to identify reform proposals requested by the federal judiciary.ResultsWe find that the likelihood that the federal judiciary achieves reform goals is conditioned by policy scope and ideological congruence with Congress.ConclusionsWe conclude that congressional administration of the federal courts is politically strategic.

ObjectivesWe ask whether the requests the federal judiciary makes to Congress are conditioned either on political factors or on its actual institutional needs. Methods. We build a new measure of the yearly well‐being of the federal courts from 1978 through 2013 using factor analysis. We specify two formal models to generate testable hypotheses that help to untangle equilibria behavior resulting from competing claims on judicial preferences for court reforms. We test these claims using data from the chief justice's Year‐End Reports on the Federal Judiciary. Results. We find that requests are not conditioned upon the courts' actual institutional needs but instead upon their ideological proximity to the Senate. Conclusion. We conclude that the federal judiciary views its own administration in a similarly political fashion as its elected counterparts.

AbstractIn this article, we present and test a market-based model of news content about state courts of last resort. We test our theory by examining newspaper coverage of decisions in death penalty cases. Our empirical results indicate that news elements of drama, novelty, and sensationalism influence coverage of state high courts' death penalty cases rather than traditional indicators of legal salience. News content either anywhere in a newspaper or on its front page is influenced by similar factors, but front-page coverage is more sensitive to dramatic conviction reversals and the rarity of executions in a given state. Our results suggest that traditional explanations of the relationship between crime and newsworthiness have limited impact on media attention given to state supreme courts. Media coverage of state high courts is instead associated primarily with the behavior of the court and its justices.

The vetting of potential federal judges by the Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary of the American Bar Association (ABA) is politically controversial. Conservatives allege the Standing Committee is biased against Republican nominees. The ABA and its defenders argue the ABA rates nominees objectively based on their qualifications. The authors investigate whether accusations of liberal bias have merit. They analyze all individuals nominated to the U.S. Courts of Appeals from 1977 to 2008. Using genetic matching methods and ordered logit models, the authors find evidence of bias against Republican nominees in the ABA's ratings. They conclude by discussing the implications of these results.