Politics from the Bench? Ideology and Strategic Voting in the U.S. Supreme Court

Tom S. Clark, B. Pablo Montagnes and Jörg Spenkuch

No 7264, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Supreme Court justices often vote along ideological lines. Is this due to a genuinely different interpretation of the law, or does it reflect justices' desire to resolve politically charged legal questions in accordance with their personal views? To learn more about the nature of decision-making in the Court, we differentiate between votes that were pivotal and those that were not. When a justice's choice decides the outcome of a case, her ideology plays an even greater role in determining her vote - both relative to her choices on other cases and relative to other justices voting on the same case. We develop and empirically assess a model of voting in which judges trade off expressive and instrumental concerns. The evidence we present suggests that justices vote strategically, at least in part, to affect precedent.

Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7264.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Politics from the Bench? Ideology and Strategic Voting in the U.S. Supreme Court (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7264

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().