Forrest Maltzman
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1096478 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Forrest Maltzman |
| NOMBRES | Forrest |
| APELLIDO | Maltzman |
| FIRMA | MALTZMAN F |
| AFILIACIONES | George Washington University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 37 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 1004 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1994 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2014 |
| ÍNDICE H | 18 |
Stepping on Congress
Legislative enactment is only one step in the life of a law. How a law shapes public life after enactment is frequently the result of whether the judiciary interprets the provisions contained in a law and how courts reconcile provisions within and across laws. But the factors that determine whether the judiciary ends up playing such a role are not well understood. We investigate why the courts, through statutory interpretation, address some major…
Unleashing Presidential Power
In this article, we use a multimethod approach to shed light on the strategic use of presidential pets. We draw on primary source materials to demonstrate that pets are an important power center in the White House. Then we turn to presidents' strategic use of their pets in public. We present a theoretical framework and statistical evidence to explore the conditions under which presidents are most likely to trot out their four-legged friends. We s…
The Constrained Court
How do Supreme Court justices decide their cases? Do they follow their policy preferences? Or are they constrained by the law and by other political actors? This book combines new theoretical insights and extensive data analysis to show that law and politics together shape the behavior of justices on the Supreme Court. The book shows how two types of constraints have influenced the decision making of the modern Court. First, the book documents th…
The constrained court
The Impact of Party Cues on Citizen Evaluations of Senators
Students of Congress highlight the connections that legislators cultivate with constituents, bonds that help to secure voters’ trust and incumbents’ reelection. We revisit the forces that shape citizens’ evaluations of their senators, embedding a survey experiment in the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to test for the impact of party labels. We show that citizens think more highly of senators from the opposite party when prompted wi…
Lee Sigelman
On September 27, 2007, Lee Sigelman sent an e-mail message to a large number of coauthors, friends, and colleagues. The message began: “Friends: I'm sorry to burden you with the news that follows ...” What followed was Lee's report that earlier in the day, he had received a diagnosis of stage IV colon cancer, that it had spread beyond the colon, and that he had six to twelve months (soon revised upward to almost two years) to live. For the next 2…
Does Legal Doctrine Matter? Unpacking Law and Policy Preferences on the U.S. Supreme Court
Judicial scholars often struggle to disentangle the effects of law and policy preferences on U.S. Supreme Court decision making. We employ a new approach to measuring the effect—if any—of the law on justices' decisions. We use positions taken on Supreme Court cases by members of Congress and presidents to identify policy components of voting. Doing so enables us to isolate the effects of three legal doctrines: adherence to precedent, judicial res…
Change, Continuity, and the Evolution of the Law
Congress regularly passes significant laws. Some of these laws continue in their initial form, with the original bargain struck by the enacting coalition untouched by any future laws; others are changed—strengthened or weakened—soon after passage. What accounts for this variation in the stability of laws, in the longevity of the original legislative agreement? We contend that political conditions at the time of enactment—in particular, the existe…
Who Consents? Competing Pivots in Federal Judicial Selection
The salience of judicial appointments in contemporary American politics has precipitated a surge of scholarly interest in the dynamics of advice and consent in the U.S. Senate. In this article, we compare alternative pivotal politics models of the judicial nominations process, each capturing a different set of potential veto players in the Senate. We use these spatial models to guide empirical analysis of rejection patterns in confirmation contes…
Agenda Control, the Median Justice, and the Majority Opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court
Some scholars argue that the author of the majority opinion exercises the most influence over the Court's opinion‐writing process and so can determine what becomes Court policy, at least within the limits of what some Court majority finds acceptable. Other students of the Court have suggested that the Court's median justice effectively dictates the content of the majority opinion: whatever policy the median justice most wants, she can get. We tes…
Vox Populi, Vox Dei, Vox Sagittae
On April 19, 2005, after just four rounds of voting, the College of Cardinals announced that 78-year-old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been selected as the new pope. This announcement startled many. To be sure, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for nearly a quarter of a century Ratzinger had helped select the vast majority of the cardinals who gathered to choose a successor to John Paul II, so his selection as pope coul…
Who Wins? Party Effects in Legislative Voting
Political scientists have long attempted to measure and describe the modest and contingent effects of party on the behavior of members of Congress. Recent efforts have extended the debate to the more specific question of whether or not party influences are sufficiently strong to move policy outcomes away from the median position. In this article, we specify four theories of legislative behavior. One is a preference‐based, or partyless, theory of …
Signals from the Tenth Justice
Conventional explanations of the solicitor general's influence on the Supreme Court emphasize his expertise or experience. We articulate and test a more political account based on insights from signaling theory. We argue justices will be more receptive to signals from the solicitor general (S.G.) when either the justice and S.G. are ideologically proximate or the S.G.'s signal is contrary to his ideological predisposition. We test our account ove…
Overruled
Overruled?: Legislative Overrides, Pluralism, and Contemporary Court–Congress Relations. By Jeb Barnes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 219p. $50.00. Students of the interaction between the judicial and elected branches of government typically assume that each branch can understand the other's intentions and capabilities. In classic separation-of-power models, justices do not craft opinions they know will be overridden, and Congress do…
A Conditional Model of Opinion Assignment on the Supreme Court
A Conditional Model of Opinion Assignment on the Supreme Court
The chief justice’s power to assign the majority opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court provides an indispensable agenda-setting tool for the chief. Scholars disagree, however, on what factors guide the chief’s use of his assignment powers. Some suggest that the chief assigns cases with an eye to securing his ideological goals, while others contend that the chief prefers to ensure the efficient and harmonious operation of the Court. Rather than assumi…
The Limits of Senatorial Courtesy
Because of senatorial courtesy, scholars typically assume that presidents defer to home state senators from their party when selecting judges for the federal courts. We challenge this view, arguing that presidents face structural incentives that encourage them to consult broadly with senators across the partisan and ideological spectrums in choosing nominees. Using new data on the fate of judicial vacancies on the federal district courts between …
Supreme Court Justices Really Do Follow the Election Returns
More than a century has passed since the fictional Mr. Dooley declared in his rich Irish brogue that “The Soopreme Court follows the illiction returns,” but until now no hard evidence has existed of just how fixated the Court is on presidential elections [but see Flemming and Wood 1997; Mishler and Sheehan 1993]. Fortunately, now we have proof positive, which we serendipitously unearthed from its resting place in the Library of Congress, where it…
Policymaking through Advice and Consent
Conventional wisdom holds that the President of the United States has a high degree of autonomy over U.S. foreign policy. Such autonomy is said to stem in part from his ability to confront the Senate with the either-or choice of accepting or rejecting treaties. In this article, we take issue with this characterization and explore how the Senate uses treaty "reservations" to alter ratification documents and advance Senate policy views. We find con…
Partisanship, Blame Avoidance, and the Distribution of Legislative Pork
majority party advantage in the allocation of federal resources, a relation? ship seemingly at odds with the bipartisan support often enjoyed by distributive policies and pragrams. We reconcile this disjuncture by developing a partisan blame avoidance account of the distribution of legisla? tive pork. According to this account, the majority party inoculates itself against minority party charges of wasteful spending by including the minority in po…
Senatorial Delay in Confirming Federal Judges, 1947-1998
presidential appointees to the lower federal bench. Here, we focus on the duration of the confirmation process for presidential appointees to the United States Circuit Courts of Appeal between 1947 and 1998 and explain the variation over time in the length of the confirmation process. With newly collected data on the fate of all appellate nominees during that period, we show how ideological incentives and institutional opportunities combine to af…
The Politics of Speaker Cannon's Committee Assignments
decision-making process. erhaps the most fabled example of the Speaker's use of institutional power is Speaker Joseph Cannon's appointment of committees in the early twentieth century (Jones 1968). Conventional wisdom holds that Cannon used his unilateral control over assignments to further a variety of political goals, including securing Cannon's own position as House leader. Although Cannon's critics insisted that Cannon manipulated committee a…
Bargaining on the U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court opinions contain legal rules with broad policy ramifications, and justices try to shape the substance of the Court's opinions. Despite this expectation, scholars have neither systematically measured nor explained the extent to which justices attempt to affect majority opinions. We articulate and test a model that explains how justices respond to majority opinion drafts. Our argument is that justices decide how to respond based on th…
Uncovering the Hidden Effect of Party
Some recent scholarship affords political parties little role in explaining patterns of legislative outcomes. Policy preferences, rather than partisanship, are said to provide the superior account of legislative behavior. In this paper, we challenge one recent such account of legislative outcomes. We show that the likelihood of finding a party effect depends on where we look for it and with what measures we use to test for it. Party effects, we f…
The Politics of Executive Orders
Conventional wisdom suggests that Presidents use executive orders, sometimes characterized as presidential legislation, when legislation is too difficult to pass (in the face of an opposition Congress, for example) or when executive departments or agencies tend to embrace their congressional patrons, rather than the White House. According to this model, executive orders are strategic instruments used by a President to circumvent the constitutiona…
Partisanship, Blame Avoidance, and the Distribution of Legislative Pork
majority party advantage in the allocation of federal resources, a relation? ship seemingly at odds with the bipartisan support often enjoyed by distributive policies and pragrams. We reconcile this disjuncture by developing a partisan blame avoidance account of the distribution of legisla? tive pork. According to this account, the majority party inoculates itself against minority party charges of wasteful spending by including the minority in po…
The Politics of Talk
One- and five-minute morning speeches and special orders at the end of the day provide members of the House of Representative the opportunity to express themselves to a national audience. We hypothesize that these opportunities for unconstrained floor time can be used either to further a member's electoral prospects or to shape the policy debate. Using data on House members' behavior during the One-hundred Third Congress, we show that the use of …
Senatorial Delay in Confirming Federal Judges, 1947-1998
presidential appointees to the lower federal bench. Here, we focus on the duration of the confirmation process for presidential appointees to the United States Circuit Courts of Appeal between 1947 and 1998 and explain the variation over time in the length of the confirmation process. With newly collected data on the fate of all appellate nominees during that period, we show how ideological incentives and institutional opportunities combine to af…
Signals from the Tenth Justice
Conventional explanations of the solicitor general's influence on the Supreme Court emphasize his expertise or experience. We articulate and test a more political account based on insights from signaling theory. We argue justices will be more receptive to signals from the solicitor general (S.G.) when either the justice and S.G. are ideologically proximate or the S.G.'s signal is contrary to his ideological predisposition. We test our account ove…
The Politics of Executive Orders
Conventional wisdom suggests that Presidents use executive orders, sometimes characterized as presidential legislation, when legislation is too difficult to pass (in the face of an opposition Congress, for example) or when executive departments or agencies tend to embrace their congressional patrons, rather than the White House. According to this model, executive orders are strategic instruments used by a President to circumvent the constitutiona…
Who Wins? Party Effects in Legislative Voting
Political scientists have long attempted to measure and describe the modest and contingent effects of party on the behavior of members of Congress. Recent efforts have extended the debate to the more specific question of whether or not party influences are sufficiently strong to move policy outcomes away from the median position. In this article, we specify four theories of legislative behavior. One is a preference‐based, or partyless, theory of …
Change, Continuity, and the Evolution of the Law
Congress regularly passes significant laws. Some of these laws continue in their initial form, with the original bargain struck by the enacting coalition untouched by any future laws; others are changed—strengthened or weakened—soon after passage. What accounts for this variation in the stability of laws, in the longevity of the original legislative agreement? We contend that political conditions at the time of enactment—in particular, the existe…
Uncovering the Hidden Effect of Party
Some recent scholarship affords political parties little role in explaining patterns of legislative outcomes. Policy preferences, rather than partisanship, are said to provide the superior account of legislative behavior. In this paper, we challenge one recent such account of legislative outcomes. We show that the likelihood of finding a party effect depends on where we look for it and with what measures we use to test for it. Party effects, we f…
May It Please the Chief? Opinion Assignments in the Rehnquist Court
Theory: Majority opinion assignments made by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can be accounted for with both organizational and attitudinal models of behavior. Hypotheses: The likelihood that the Chief assigns an opinion to a justice depends upon the importance of each case, the size of the initial majority coalition, the timing of the decision, and each justice's expertise, efficiency, workload, and policy preferences. Method: A discrete c…
Does Legal Doctrine Matter? Unpacking Law and Policy Preferences on the U.S. Supreme Court
Judicial scholars often struggle to disentangle the effects of law and policy preferences on U.S. Supreme Court decision making. We employ a new approach to measuring the effect—if any—of the law on justices' decisions. We use positions taken on Supreme Court cases by members of Congress and presidents to identify policy components of voting. Doing so enables us to isolate the effects of three legal doctrines: adherence to precedent, judicial res…
Marshalling the Court
Theory: Supreme Court opinion authors make strategic calculations about the need to craft opinions that are acceptable to their colleagues on the bench. Hypotheses: The willingness of justices to accommodate their colleagues depends upon the size and ideological makeup of the majority conference coalition and the number of suggestions and threats issued by their colleagues. These strategic considerations are important even after controlling for a…
Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics
Journal Article Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice and Public Policy, by Bryan D. Jones Get access Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice and Public Policy by Bryan D. Jones. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. 277 pp. Cloth, $42.00; paper, $15.95. Forrest Maltzman Forrest Maltzman George Washington University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Goog…
Who Consents? Competing Pivots in Federal Judicial Selection
The salience of judicial appointments in contemporary American politics has precipitated a surge of scholarly interest in the dynamics of advice and consent in the U.S. Senate. In this article, we compare alternative pivotal politics models of the judicial nominations process, each capturing a different set of potential veto players in the Senate. We use these spatial models to guide empirical analysis of rejection patterns in confirmation contes…
Strategic Policy Considerations and Voting Fluidity on the Burger Court
Justices are strategic actors. This is particularly evident when they change their votes between the original conference on the merits and the Court's announcement of the final decision. We predict that such voting fluidity may be influenced by strategic policy considerations, justices' uncertainty over issues involved in a case, the chief justice's interest in protecting his prerogatives, and other institutional pressures. To test our hypotheses…
Meeting Competing Demands
Theory: A conditional model of committee behavior is proposed to explain variation in committee responsiveness to chamber and party principals. Hypotheses: Committee member behavior is consistent with the preferences of both the floor and the party caucuses; variation in salience explains differences in committee responsiveness to noncommittee colleagues. Methods: Committee-specific votes are scaled to produce spatial locations for committee, flo…
Senators' Home-State Reputations
A Conditional Model of Opinion Assignment on the Supreme Court
The chief justice’s power to assign the majority opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court provides an indispensable agenda-setting tool for the chief. Scholars disagree, however, on what factors guide the chief’s use of his assignment powers. Some suggest that the chief assigns cases with an eye to securing his ideological goals, while others contend that the chief prefers to ensure the efficient and harmonious operation of the Court. Rather than assumi…
The Limits of Senatorial Courtesy
Because of senatorial courtesy, scholars typically assume that presidents defer to home state senators from their party when selecting judges for the federal courts. We challenge this view, arguing that presidents face structural incentives that encourage them to consult broadly with senators across the partisan and ideological spectrums in choosing nominees. Using new data on the fate of judicial vacancies on the federal district courts between …
Policymaking through Advice and Consent
Conventional wisdom holds that the President of the United States has a high degree of autonomy over U.S. foreign policy. Such autonomy is said to stem in part from his ability to confront the Senate with the either-or choice of accepting or rejecting treaties. In this article, we take issue with this characterization and explore how the Senate uses treaty "reservations" to alter ratification documents and advance Senate policy views. We find con…
Bargaining on the U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court opinions contain legal rules with broad policy ramifications, and justices try to shape the substance of the Court's opinions. Despite this expectation, scholars have neither systematically measured nor explained the extent to which justices attempt to affect majority opinions. We articulate and test a model that explains how justices respond to majority opinion drafts. Our argument is that justices decide how to respond based on th…
The Politics of Speaker Cannon's Committee Assignments
decision-making process. erhaps the most fabled example of the Speaker's use of institutional power is Speaker Joseph Cannon's appointment of committees in the early twentieth century (Jones 1968). Conventional wisdom holds that Cannon used his unilateral control over assignments to further a variety of political goals, including securing Cannon's own position as House leader. Although Cannon's critics insisted that Cannon manipulated committee a…
Principals, Goals, Dimensionality, and Congressional Committees
Unleashing Presidential Power
In this article, we use a multimethod approach to shed light on the strategic use of presidential pets. We draw on primary source materials to demonstrate that pets are an important power center in the White House. Then we turn to presidents' strategic use of their pets in public. We present a theoretical framework and statistical evidence to explore the conditions under which presidents are most likely to trot out their four-legged friends. We s…
Inside the U.S. Supreme Court
Judicial scholars are making increased use of data from the justices' personal papers. In the face of comments by justices questioning the reliability of this information and, perhaps, skepticism among judicial scholars about the reliability of some justices' records, it is important to explore the reliability of data drawn from their papers. To do so, we examine the conference records for the 1967 and 1968 terms of the Supreme Court. For these y…
The Impact of Party Cues on Citizen Evaluations of Senators
Students of Congress highlight the connections that legislators cultivate with constituents, bonds that help to secure voters’ trust and incumbents’ reelection. We revisit the forces that shape citizens’ evaluations of their senators, embedding a survey experiment in the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to test for the impact of party labels. We show that citizens think more highly of senators from the opposite party when prompted wi…
Principals, Goals, Dimensionality, and Congressional Committees
Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics
Journal Article Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice and Public Policy, by Bryan D. Jones Get access Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice and Public Policy by Bryan D. Jones. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. 277 pp. Cloth, $42.00; paper, $15.95. Forrest Maltzman Forrest Maltzman George Washington University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Goog…
Meeting Competing Demands
Theory: A conditional model of committee behavior is proposed to explain variation in committee responsiveness to chamber and party principals. Hypotheses: Committee member behavior is consistent with the preferences of both the floor and the party caucuses; variation in salience explains differences in committee responsiveness to noncommittee colleagues. Methods: Committee-specific votes are scaled to produce spatial locations for committee, flo…
Leaving Office Feet First
Charlie Wilson (D-TX) described his decision to retire from the U.S. House of Representatives as the best of the three options open to him: “To get defeated, to get carried out feet first, or to ... start another life” (Gerhart and Groer 1995). Although much research has been undertaken on electoral defeat (Collie 1981; Ferejohn 1977; Jacobson 1992; Mann 1978) and voluntary retirement (Gilmour and Rothstein 1996; Groseclose and Krehbiel 1994; Hal…
Inside the U.S. Supreme Court
Judicial scholars are making increased use of data from the justices' personal papers. In the face of comments by justices questioning the reliability of this information and, perhaps, skepticism among judicial scholars about the reliability of some justices' records, it is important to explore the reliability of data drawn from their papers. To do so, we examine the conference records for the 1967 and 1968 terms of the Supreme Court. For these y…
The Politics of Talk
One- and five-minute morning speeches and special orders at the end of the day provide members of the House of Representative the opportunity to express themselves to a national audience. We hypothesize that these opportunities for unconstrained floor time can be used either to further a member's electoral prospects or to shape the policy debate. Using data on House members' behavior during the One-hundred Third Congress, we show that the use of …
May It Please the Chief? Opinion Assignments in the Rehnquist Court
Theory: Majority opinion assignments made by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can be accounted for with both organizational and attitudinal models of behavior. Hypotheses: The likelihood that the Chief assigns an opinion to a justice depends upon the importance of each case, the size of the initial majority coalition, the timing of the decision, and each justice's expertise, efficiency, workload, and policy preferences. Method: A discrete c…
Strategic Policy Considerations and Voting Fluidity on the Burger Court
Justices are strategic actors. This is particularly evident when they change their votes between the original conference on the merits and the Court's announcement of the final decision. We predict that such voting fluidity may be influenced by strategic policy considerations, justices' uncertainty over issues involved in a case, the chief justice's interest in protecting his prerogatives, and other institutional pressures. To test our hypotheses…
Competing Principals
Since Woodrow Wilson, political scientists have recognized the importance of congressional committees in the policy-making process. Congressional committees often determine what legislation will reach the floor of the House or Senate and what form that legislation will take. In spite of the broad consensus on the importance of congressional committees, there is little agreement on what explains committee action. Committees are alternately viewed …
People in Political Science
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Senators' Home-State Reputations
Maintaining Congressional Committees
Marshalling the Court
Theory: Supreme Court opinion authors make strategic calculations about the need to craft opinions that are acceptable to their colleagues on the bench. Hypotheses: The willingness of justices to accommodate their colleagues depends upon the size and ideological makeup of the majority conference coalition and the number of suggestions and threats issued by their colleagues. These strategic considerations are important even after controlling for a…
Bargaining on the U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court opinions contain legal rules with broad policy ramifications, and justices try to shape the substance of the Court's opinions. Despite this expectation, scholars have neither systematically measured nor explained the extent to which justices attempt to affect majority opinions. We articulate and test a model that explains how justices respond to majority opinion drafts. Our argument is that justices decide how to respond based on th…
Uncovering the Hidden Effect of Party
Some recent scholarship affords political parties little role in explaining patterns of legislative outcomes. Policy preferences, rather than partisanship, are said to provide the superior account of legislative behavior. In this paper, we challenge one recent such account of legislative outcomes. We show that the likelihood of finding a party effect depends on where we look for it and with what measures we use to test for it. Party effects, we f…
The Politics of Executive Orders
Conventional wisdom suggests that Presidents use executive orders, sometimes characterized as presidential legislation, when legislation is too difficult to pass (in the face of an opposition Congress, for example) or when executive departments or agencies tend to embrace their congressional patrons, rather than the White House. According to this model, executive orders are strategic instruments used by a President to circumvent the constitutiona…
The Politics of Speaker Cannon's Committee Assignments
decision-making process. erhaps the most fabled example of the Speaker's use of institutional power is Speaker Joseph Cannon's appointment of committees in the early twentieth century (Jones 1968). Conventional wisdom holds that Cannon used his unilateral control over assignments to further a variety of political goals, including securing Cannon's own position as House leader. Although Cannon's critics insisted that Cannon manipulated committee a…
Partisanship, Blame Avoidance, and the Distribution of Legislative Pork
majority party advantage in the allocation of federal resources, a relation? ship seemingly at odds with the bipartisan support often enjoyed by distributive policies and pragrams. We reconcile this disjuncture by developing a partisan blame avoidance account of the distribution of legisla? tive pork. According to this account, the majority party inoculates itself against minority party charges of wasteful spending by including the minority in po…
Senatorial Delay in Confirming Federal Judges, 1947-1998
presidential appointees to the lower federal bench. Here, we focus on the duration of the confirmation process for presidential appointees to the United States Circuit Courts of Appeal between 1947 and 1998 and explain the variation over time in the length of the confirmation process. With newly collected data on the fate of all appellate nominees during that period, we show how ideological incentives and institutional opportunities combine to af…
Policymaking through Advice and Consent
Conventional wisdom holds that the President of the United States has a high degree of autonomy over U.S. foreign policy. Such autonomy is said to stem in part from his ability to confront the Senate with the either-or choice of accepting or rejecting treaties. In this article, we take issue with this characterization and explore how the Senate uses treaty "reservations" to alter ratification documents and advance Senate policy views. We find con…
Overruled
Overruled?: Legislative Overrides, Pluralism, and Contemporary Court–Congress Relations. By Jeb Barnes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 219p. $50.00. Students of the interaction between the judicial and elected branches of government typically assume that each branch can understand the other's intentions and capabilities. In classic separation-of-power models, justices do not craft opinions they know will be overridden, and Congress do…
A Conditional Model of Opinion Assignment on the Supreme Court
A Conditional Model of Opinion Assignment on the Supreme Court
The chief justice’s power to assign the majority opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court provides an indispensable agenda-setting tool for the chief. Scholars disagree, however, on what factors guide the chief’s use of his assignment powers. Some suggest that the chief assigns cases with an eye to securing his ideological goals, while others contend that the chief prefers to ensure the efficient and harmonious operation of the Court. Rather than assumi…
The Limits of Senatorial Courtesy
Because of senatorial courtesy, scholars typically assume that presidents defer to home state senators from their party when selecting judges for the federal courts. We challenge this view, arguing that presidents face structural incentives that encourage them to consult broadly with senators across the partisan and ideological spectrums in choosing nominees. Using new data on the fate of judicial vacancies on the federal district courts between …
Supreme Court Justices Really Do Follow the Election Returns
More than a century has passed since the fictional Mr. Dooley declared in his rich Irish brogue that “The Soopreme Court follows the illiction returns,” but until now no hard evidence has existed of just how fixated the Court is on presidential elections [but see Flemming and Wood 1997; Mishler and Sheehan 1993]. Fortunately, now we have proof positive, which we serendipitously unearthed from its resting place in the Library of Congress, where it…
Political science (35 obras) · Law (30 obras) · Law (29 obras) · Politics (25 obras) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (18 obras) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (16 obras) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (15 obras) · Economics (14 obras) · Public Administration (12 obras) · Law and economics (11 obras)