Judicial Retirements and the Staying Power of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

The influence of U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions depends critically on how these opinions are received and treated by lower courts, which decide the vast majority of legal disputes. We argue that the retirement of Justices on the Supreme Court serves as a simple heuristic device for lower court judges in deciding how much deference to show to Supreme Court precedent. Using a unique dataset of the treatment of all Supreme Court majority opinions in the courts of appeals from 1953 to 2012, we find that negative treatments of Supreme Court opinions increase, and positive treatments decrease, as the Justices who supported a decision retire from the Court. Importantly, this effect exists over and above the impact of retirements on the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court

Measuring Policy Content on the U.S. Supreme Court

Political scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of the influences on Supreme Court decision making. Yet, much less attention has been paid to empirical measures of the Court’s ideological output. We develop a theory of the interactions between rational litigants, lower court judges, and Supreme Court justices. We argue that the most common measure of the Supreme Court’s ideological output—whether the Court’s decision is liberal or conservative—suffers from systematic bias. We trace this bias empirically and explain the undesirable consequences it has for empirical analyses of judicial behavior. Specifically, we show that, although the Court’s preferences are positively correlated with the ideological direction of the justices’ decision to reverse a lower court, the attitudes of the justices are negatively related—and significantly so—to the ideological direction of outcomes that affirm lower court decisions. We also offer a solution that allows scholars to work around this ‘‘affirmance bias.’

Replication data for: The Politics of Constitutional Review in Germany

Constitutional courts have emerged as central institutions in many advanced democracies. This book investigates the sources and the limits of judicial authority, focusing on the central role of public support for judicial independence. The empirical sections of the book illustrate the theoretical argument in an in-depth study of the German Federal Constitutional Court, including statistical analysis of judicial decisions, case studies, and interviews with judges and legislators. The book’s major finding is that the interests of governing majorities, prevailing public opinion, and the transparency of the political environment exert a powerful influence on judicial decisions. Judges are influenced not only by jurisprudential considerations and their policy preferences, but also by strategic concerns. By highlighting this dimension of constitutional review, the book challenges the contention that high court justices are largely unconstrained actors as well as the notion that constitutional courts lack democratic legitimacy

Replication data for: Wasting Time? The Impact of Ideology and Size on Delay in Coalition Formation

Coalition theory has a distinguished tradition in comparative politics. Beginning with William Riker’s The Theory of Political Coalitions,1 comparativists have made considerable theoretical and empirical progress in understanding the complexities of coalition politics, most significantly with respect to government formation and termination. Other important dimensions of coalition politics, however, remain virtually unexplored. We focus on one such neglected feature of coalition bargaining – the duration of negotiations preceding the establishment of a new cabinet. As Table 1 shows, there is significant variation in the amount of time required to establish coalitions across and within West European democracies. In Denmark and Sweden, for example, coalition negotiations usually conclude in about a week. In Austria, Belgium and Italy, establishing a new government takes on average more than a month. In the Netherlands, almost three months pass before a new coalition takes offic

Replication data for: Policing the Bargain: Coalition Government and Parliamentary Scrutiny

Policymaking by coalition governments creates a classic principal-agent problem. Coalitions are comprised of parties with divergent preferences who are forced to delegate important policymaking powers to individual cabinet ministers, thus raising the possibility that ministers will attempt to pursue policies favored by their own party at the expense of their coalition partners. What is going to keep ministers from attempting to move policy in directions they favor rather than sticking to the "coalition deal"? We argue that parties will make use of parliamentary scrutiny of "hostile" ministerial proposals to overcome the potential problems of delegation and enforce the coalition bargain. Statistical analysis of original data on government bills in Germany and the Netherlands supports this argument. Our findings suggest that parliaments play a central role in allowing multiparty governments to solve intra-coalition conflicts

Coalition formation and policymaking in parliamentary democracies

The majority of the world's advanced industrial democracies are parliamentary systems, and in most of those, coalition government is the norm. Thus, it is not surprising that understanding how coalition governments come about, and how they operate, has been a primary focus of comparative scholars. Until recently, most studies in this area focused primarily on the formation and dissolution of multiparty governments, rather than on the behavior of coalition partners between those events. Moreover, they adopted what was, in essence, an ``institutions-free'' approach to explaining coalition bargaining. Following the advent of ``new institutionalism'' in the 1980s, researchers began to consider the role of institutions in coalition politics more seriously, particularly with respect to coalition formation. Soon thereafter, scholars turned their attention to the policymaking process between the birth and death of coalitions. In these accounts, institutional structures at the executive and parliamentary levels play a central role. In this chapter, we survey key findings regarding the impact of institutions on coalition politics, focusing on government formation and the subsequent policymaking process