Peer Effects on the United States Supreme Court

Richard Holden, Michael Keane () and Matthew Lilley ()
Additional contact information
Matthew Lilley: Harvard University

No 2017-W02, Economics Papers from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Abstract: Using data on essentially every US Supreme Court decision since 1946, we estimate a model of peer effects on the Court. We consider both the impact of justice ideology and justice votes on the votes of their peers. To identify these peer effects we use two instruments. The first is based on the composition of the Court, determined by which justices sit on which cases due to recusals or health reasons for not sitting. The second utilizes the fact that many justices previously sat on Federal Circuit Courts and are empirically much more likely to affirm decisions from their “home” court. We find large peer effects. Replacing a single justice with one who votes in a conservative direction 10 percentage points more frequently increases the probability that each other justice votes conservative by 1.63 percentage points. In terms of votes, a 10 percentage point increase in the probability that a single justice votes conservative leads to a 1.1 percentage increase in the probability that each other justice votes conservative. Finally, a single justice becoming 10% more likely to vote conservative increases the share of cases with a conservative outcome by 3.6 percentage points–excluding the direct effect of that justice–and reduces the share with a liberal outcome by 3.2 percentage points. In general, the indirect effect of a justice’s vote on the outcome through the votes of their peers is typically several times larger than the direct mechanical effect of the justice’s own vote.

Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2017-02-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/economics/papers/2017/Scotus%20final.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Peer effects on the United States Supreme Court (2021)
Working Paper: Peer Effects on the United States Supreme Court (2020)
Working Paper: Peer Effects on the United States Supreme Court (2019)
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:nuf:econwp:1702

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Papers from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maxine Collett ().