Patrick C Wohlfarth
Biographic Data
| ID | 1493376 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patrick C Wohlfarth |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patrick C |
| FAMILY NAME | Wohlfarth |
| SIGNATURE | WOHLFARTH P C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 238 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Considering Constitutional Change: Survey Evidence on Public Attitudes Toward Term Limits for Federal Judges
This article analyzes public attitudes toward replacing lifetime tenure with term limits for federal judges, including U.S. Supreme Court justices. We employ novel data that we collected from a nationwide survey experiment. We find that although partisans are less supportive of proposals from their opponents, the magnitude of this effect is much smaller than one might expect in today’s polarized environment. We also find that a respondent’s suppo…
Greater public confidence in the US Supreme Court predicts more jurisdiction stripping
A growing body of empirical research shows an association between public support for the US Supreme Court and both judicial independence and congressional court curbing activity. At the same time, studies of jurisdiction stripping show Congress’ efforts to limit federal courts’ jurisdiction are principally related to courts’ workloads rather than ideological differences between courts and Congress. Here, the authors connect these streams of inqui…
On Estimating Personality Traits of US Supreme Court Justices
Psychological scholarship on personality is uniting with political science to redefine existing theories. This is clearly the case with research on judicial behavior and the US Supreme Court. But if this new approach is to survive and thrive, it must employ measures equal to the task. We show that Supreme Court Individual Personality Estimates, which seek to estimate justices’ personalities by examining their concurring opinions, suffer from a nu…
Trends: The Geography of Law: Understanding the Origin of State and Federal Redistricting Cases
Knowing where legal complaints arise can tell us something about them and reveal clues about their conditions of origin. In this paper, we examine the geographic origins of litigation challenging the boundaries of electoral districts—an increasingly salient and prominent source of political conflict. We construct an original dataset of all redistricting cases in state and federal courts nationwide, from 1960 to 2019. We show that redistricting li…
Personalizing the U.S. Supreme Court Through Attention to Individual Justices
Objectives We examine media incentives shaping the nature of U.S. Supreme Court justices’ news coverage and, in particular, how those incentives often lead news outlets to concentrate coverage on particular justices on the Court. Methods First, we examine and model aggregate, over time patterns of news attention devoted to individual justices in the New York Times over the past four decades. Second, we compare and model temporal variation in indi…
The Influence of Home-State Reputation and Public Opinion on Federal Circuit Court Judges
At least four observationally equivalent theories argue that federal judges follow public opinion when they decide cases. Yet there is mixed empirical support for these theories. Using recently released data on public opinion, we discover that state public opinion exerts a meaningful impact on the votes of federal circuit court judges. Perhaps more important, we leverage a number of different empirical approaches to identify which theory the data…
Moving forward with time series analysis
In a recent Research and Politics article, we showed that for many types of time series data, concerns about spurious relationships can be overcome by following standard procedures associated with cointegration tests and the general error correction model (GECM). Matthew Lebo and Patrick Kraft (LK) incorrectly argue that our recommended approach will lead researchers to identify false (i.e., spurious) relationships. In this article, we show how L…
Public Mood, Previous Electoral Experience, and Responsiveness Among Federal Circuit Court Judges
Whether public opinion influences federal judges is a question that has long motivated—but often eluded—scholars. In this article, we examine two related questions: First, whether federal circuit court judges respond to circuit-level public opinion and, second, whether judges with extensive past elected political experience are even more responsive. The data show that circuit judges indeed respond to public opinion. The results also suggest that …
The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity
We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an indi…
Nominating Commissions, Judicial Retention, and Forward-Looking Behavior on State Supreme Courts: An Empirical Examination of Selection and Retention Methods
High-profile advocates are pushing states to move away from judicial elections and toward a “merit” method because it purportedly produces the best quality judges. Quality, however, is difficult to measure empirically. Rather than attempt to measure quality, we examine whether certain types of state supreme courts are more forward-looking than others. States are likely to desire forward-looking behavior among judges because it can protect judicia…
State Solicitors General, Appellate Expertise, and State Success Before the U.S. Supreme Court
This article examines how institutional design leads state governments to win their cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. We analyze whether states are more likely to prevail on the merits when they create a formal solicitor general office and have an attorney from that office argue their cases before the Court. We employ an analytical matching approach and find that attorneys from state solicitor general offices are significantly more likely to w…
How the Supreme Court Alters Opinion Language to Evade Congressional Review
We argue that actors can attempt to shield their policy choices from unfavorable review by crafting them in a manner that will increase the costs necessary for supervisory institutions to review them. We apply this theory to the US Supreme Court and demonstrate how justices strategically obfuscate the language of majority opinions in the attempt to circumvent unfavorable review from a politically hostile Congress. The results suggest that Supreme…
The Swing Justice
In the Supreme Court's most closely divided cases, one pivotal justice can determine the outcome. Given this fact, judicial scholars have paid substantial attention to the swing justice. This article makes two theoretical contributions to the study of the swing justice and this justice's resulting influence on case outcomes. First, we show that in a substantial number of cases, the justice that casts the pivotal vote is not the median justice on …
How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court
Although scholars increasingly acknowledge a contemporaneous relationship between public opinion and Supreme Court decisions, debate continues as to why this relationship exists. Does public opinion directly influence decisions or do justices simply respond to the same social forces that simultaneously shape the public mood? To answer this question, we first develop a strategy to control for the justices' attitudinal change that stems from the so…
An Appeal to the People: Public Opinion and Congressional Support for the Supreme Court
Scholars often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public support for courts cannot, by itself, explain congressional support for judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of …
The Tenth Justice? Consequences of Politicization in the Solicitor General's Office
Previous scholarly accounts of the solicitor general's (S.G.) influence on the U.S. Supreme Court emphasize either the office's role as an ideological advocate for the executive branch or its reputation as a resource for credible legal information. Yet existing empirical analyses do not fully examine the potential that political advocacy of executive policy might undermine the S.G.’s influence. I propose a theory investigating the degree to which…
How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court
Although scholars increasingly acknowledge a contemporaneous relationship between public opinion and Supreme Court decisions, debate continues as to why this relationship exists. Does public opinion directly influence decisions or do justices simply respond to the same social forces that simultaneously shape the public mood? To answer this question, we first develop a strategy to control for the justices' attitudinal change that stems from the so…
An Appeal to the People: Public Opinion and Congressional Support for the Supreme Court
Scholars often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public support for courts cannot, by itself, explain congressional support for judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of …
How the Supreme Court Alters Opinion Language to Evade Congressional Review
We argue that actors can attempt to shield their policy choices from unfavorable review by crafting them in a manner that will increase the costs necessary for supervisory institutions to review them. We apply this theory to the US Supreme Court and demonstrate how justices strategically obfuscate the language of majority opinions in the attempt to circumvent unfavorable review from a politically hostile Congress. The results suggest that Supreme…
The Swing Justice
In the Supreme Court's most closely divided cases, one pivotal justice can determine the outcome. Given this fact, judicial scholars have paid substantial attention to the swing justice. This article makes two theoretical contributions to the study of the swing justice and this justice's resulting influence on case outcomes. First, we show that in a substantial number of cases, the justice that casts the pivotal vote is not the median justice on …
The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity
We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an indi…
The Tenth Justice? Consequences of Politicization in the Solicitor General's Office
Previous scholarly accounts of the solicitor general's (S.G.) influence on the U.S. Supreme Court emphasize either the office's role as an ideological advocate for the executive branch or its reputation as a resource for credible legal information. Yet existing empirical analyses do not fully examine the potential that political advocacy of executive policy might undermine the S.G.’s influence. I propose a theory investigating the degree to which…
Nominating Commissions, Judicial Retention, and Forward-Looking Behavior on State Supreme Courts: An Empirical Examination of Selection and Retention Methods
High-profile advocates are pushing states to move away from judicial elections and toward a “merit” method because it purportedly produces the best quality judges. Quality, however, is difficult to measure empirically. Rather than attempt to measure quality, we examine whether certain types of state supreme courts are more forward-looking than others. States are likely to desire forward-looking behavior among judges because it can protect judicia…
Considering Constitutional Change: Survey Evidence on Public Attitudes Toward Term Limits for Federal Judges
This article analyzes public attitudes toward replacing lifetime tenure with term limits for federal judges, including U.S. Supreme Court justices. We employ novel data that we collected from a nationwide survey experiment. We find that although partisans are less supportive of proposals from their opponents, the magnitude of this effect is much smaller than one might expect in today’s polarized environment. We also find that a respondent’s suppo…
Greater public confidence in the US Supreme Court predicts more jurisdiction stripping
A growing body of empirical research shows an association between public support for the US Supreme Court and both judicial independence and congressional court curbing activity. At the same time, studies of jurisdiction stripping show Congress’ efforts to limit federal courts’ jurisdiction are principally related to courts’ workloads rather than ideological differences between courts and Congress. Here, the authors connect these streams of inqui…
Personalizing the U.S. Supreme Court Through Attention to Individual Justices
Objectives We examine media incentives shaping the nature of U.S. Supreme Court justices’ news coverage and, in particular, how those incentives often lead news outlets to concentrate coverage on particular justices on the Court. Methods First, we examine and model aggregate, over time patterns of news attention devoted to individual justices in the New York Times over the past four decades. Second, we compare and model temporal variation in indi…
Moving forward with time series analysis
In a recent Research and Politics article, we showed that for many types of time series data, concerns about spurious relationships can be overcome by following standard procedures associated with cointegration tests and the general error correction model (GECM). Matthew Lebo and Patrick Kraft (LK) incorrectly argue that our recommended approach will lead researchers to identify false (i.e., spurious) relationships. In this article, we show how L…
On Estimating Personality Traits of US Supreme Court Justices
Psychological scholarship on personality is uniting with political science to redefine existing theories. This is clearly the case with research on judicial behavior and the US Supreme Court. But if this new approach is to survive and thrive, it must employ measures equal to the task. We show that Supreme Court Individual Personality Estimates, which seek to estimate justices’ personalities by examining their concurring opinions, suffer from a nu…
The Influence of Home-State Reputation and Public Opinion on Federal Circuit Court Judges
At least four observationally equivalent theories argue that federal judges follow public opinion when they decide cases. Yet there is mixed empirical support for these theories. Using recently released data on public opinion, we discover that state public opinion exerts a meaningful impact on the votes of federal circuit court judges. Perhaps more important, we leverage a number of different empirical approaches to identify which theory the data…
Public Mood, Previous Electoral Experience, and Responsiveness Among Federal Circuit Court Judges
Whether public opinion influences federal judges is a question that has long motivated—but often eluded—scholars. In this article, we examine two related questions: First, whether federal circuit court judges respond to circuit-level public opinion and, second, whether judges with extensive past elected political experience are even more responsive. The data show that circuit judges indeed respond to public opinion. The results also suggest that …
The Tenth Justice? Consequences of Politicization in the Solicitor General's Office
Previous scholarly accounts of the solicitor general's (S.G.) influence on the U.S. Supreme Court emphasize either the office's role as an ideological advocate for the executive branch or its reputation as a resource for credible legal information. Yet existing empirical analyses do not fully examine the potential that political advocacy of executive policy might undermine the S.G.’s influence. I propose a theory investigating the degree to which…
How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court
Although scholars increasingly acknowledge a contemporaneous relationship between public opinion and Supreme Court decisions, debate continues as to why this relationship exists. Does public opinion directly influence decisions or do justices simply respond to the same social forces that simultaneously shape the public mood? To answer this question, we first develop a strategy to control for the justices' attitudinal change that stems from the so…
An Appeal to the People: Public Opinion and Congressional Support for the Supreme Court
Scholars often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public support for courts cannot, by itself, explain congressional support for judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of …
How the Supreme Court Alters Opinion Language to Evade Congressional Review
We argue that actors can attempt to shield their policy choices from unfavorable review by crafting them in a manner that will increase the costs necessary for supervisory institutions to review them. We apply this theory to the US Supreme Court and demonstrate how justices strategically obfuscate the language of majority opinions in the attempt to circumvent unfavorable review from a politically hostile Congress. The results suggest that Supreme…
The Swing Justice
In the Supreme Court's most closely divided cases, one pivotal justice can determine the outcome. Given this fact, judicial scholars have paid substantial attention to the swing justice. This article makes two theoretical contributions to the study of the swing justice and this justice's resulting influence on case outcomes. First, we show that in a substantial number of cases, the justice that casts the pivotal vote is not the median justice on …
State Solicitors General, Appellate Expertise, and State Success Before the U.S. Supreme Court
This article examines how institutional design leads state governments to win their cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. We analyze whether states are more likely to prevail on the merits when they create a formal solicitor general office and have an attorney from that office argue their cases before the Court. We employ an analytical matching approach and find that attorneys from state solicitor general offices are significantly more likely to w…
Nominating Commissions, Judicial Retention, and Forward-Looking Behavior on State Supreme Courts: An Empirical Examination of Selection and Retention Methods
High-profile advocates are pushing states to move away from judicial elections and toward a “merit” method because it purportedly produces the best quality judges. Quality, however, is difficult to measure empirically. Rather than attempt to measure quality, we examine whether certain types of state supreme courts are more forward-looking than others. States are likely to desire forward-looking behavior among judges because it can protect judicia…
The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity
We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an indi…
Moving forward with time series analysis
In a recent Research and Politics article, we showed that for many types of time series data, concerns about spurious relationships can be overcome by following standard procedures associated with cointegration tests and the general error correction model (GECM). Matthew Lebo and Patrick Kraft (LK) incorrectly argue that our recommended approach will lead researchers to identify false (i.e., spurious) relationships. In this article, we show how L…
Public Mood, Previous Electoral Experience, and Responsiveness Among Federal Circuit Court Judges
Whether public opinion influences federal judges is a question that has long motivated—but often eluded—scholars. In this article, we examine two related questions: First, whether federal circuit court judges respond to circuit-level public opinion and, second, whether judges with extensive past elected political experience are even more responsive. The data show that circuit judges indeed respond to public opinion. The results also suggest that …
The Influence of Home-State Reputation and Public Opinion on Federal Circuit Court Judges
At least four observationally equivalent theories argue that federal judges follow public opinion when they decide cases. Yet there is mixed empirical support for these theories. Using recently released data on public opinion, we discover that state public opinion exerts a meaningful impact on the votes of federal circuit court judges. Perhaps more important, we leverage a number of different empirical approaches to identify which theory the data…
Personalizing the U.S. Supreme Court Through Attention to Individual Justices
Objectives We examine media incentives shaping the nature of U.S. Supreme Court justices’ news coverage and, in particular, how those incentives often lead news outlets to concentrate coverage on particular justices on the Court. Methods First, we examine and model aggregate, over time patterns of news attention devoted to individual justices in the New York Times over the past four decades. Second, we compare and model temporal variation in indi…
On Estimating Personality Traits of US Supreme Court Justices
Psychological scholarship on personality is uniting with political science to redefine existing theories. This is clearly the case with research on judicial behavior and the US Supreme Court. But if this new approach is to survive and thrive, it must employ measures equal to the task. We show that Supreme Court Individual Personality Estimates, which seek to estimate justices’ personalities by examining their concurring opinions, suffer from a nu…
Trends: The Geography of Law: Understanding the Origin of State and Federal Redistricting Cases
Knowing where legal complaints arise can tell us something about them and reveal clues about their conditions of origin. In this paper, we examine the geographic origins of litigation challenging the boundaries of electoral districts—an increasingly salient and prominent source of political conflict. We construct an original dataset of all redistricting cases in state and federal courts nationwide, from 1960 to 2019. We show that redistricting li…
Greater public confidence in the US Supreme Court predicts more jurisdiction stripping
A growing body of empirical research shows an association between public support for the US Supreme Court and both judicial independence and congressional court curbing activity. At the same time, studies of jurisdiction stripping show Congress’ efforts to limit federal courts’ jurisdiction are principally related to courts’ workloads rather than ideological differences between courts and Congress. Here, the authors connect these streams of inqui…
Considering Constitutional Change: Survey Evidence on Public Attitudes Toward Term Limits for Federal Judges
This article analyzes public attitudes toward replacing lifetime tenure with term limits for federal judges, including U.S. Supreme Court justices. We employ novel data that we collected from a nationwide survey experiment. We find that although partisans are less supportive of proposals from their opponents, the magnitude of this effect is much smaller than one might expect in today’s polarized environment. We also find that a respondent’s suppo…
Law (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (14 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Supreme court (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems (8 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Supreme Court Decisions (6 works)