As promised, I have found some additional articles that should be of interest to some of our readers. This week the scholarship is a little heavy on the quantitative side, with a particular emphasis on some interesting work being done by political scientists.
James L. Gibson (Washington University Department of Political Science) and Gregory A. Caldeira (Ohio State University Department of Political Science and Law School) have posted “Supreme Court Nominations, Legitimacy Theory, and the American Public: A Dynamic Test of the Theory of Positivity Bias” on SSRN, see here. Using a three-wave national survey, Caldeira and Gibson make some absolutely fascinating discoveries about the views of Americans about the Supreme Court. There is a lot of interesting stuff in this paper, and I may try to blog more extensively about this paper down the line, but a key finding is that being exposed to advertisements during Alito’s confirmation process seemed to undermine support for the Court. In contrast, paying attention to the confirmation hearings actually increased support for the Court, though the findings on this variable were marginal and insignificant according to the authors. This area is a keen interest of mine as I am working on a paper for Texas Law Review analyzing the nomination and confirmation process, but more on that later. As I said, this is a really interesting paper and Caldeira and Gibson do a fine job of making their analysis accessible to people without a quantitative background.
Christopher Zorn (University of South Carolina Department of Political Science), who has also written about the influence of Supreme Court law clerks, see here, has posted a co-authored paper with Jennifer Barnes Bowie (University of South Carolina Department of Political Science) on the issue of “hierarchy effects” on judicial decision making, see here. The hypothesis they test is whether the influence of judicial policy preferences on judicial decision making increase as one moves higher up the judicial hierarchy (i.e., from the Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court). The results are interesting but unsurprising: “as one moves up the institutional pyramid, judges’ policy preferences exert an increasingly important influence on their decision making.” This is a nice, short paper, but is perhaps a bit less accessible to non-quantitative folks than the Caldeira and Gibson paper.
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