David A Hughes
Biographic Data
| ID | 4393817 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David A Hughes |
| GIVEN NAMES | David A |
| FAMILY NAME | Hughes |
| SIGNATURE | HUGHES D A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Auburn University at Montgomery |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4674-7102 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 37 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Evolution of State Courts Research in the Twenty-First Century
This review essay documents research on state courts throughout the last 25 years, tracking many of the important changes affecting state courts. Since State Politics & Policy Quarterly ( SPPQ ) began publication in 2001, research on state courts has evaluated a diverse range of topics, including traditionally important areas like the decisions of state judges, the effectiveness of elections for promoting accountability, public attitudes toward s…
Judicial Institutions, Independence, and the Separation of Powers
We study the separation of powers between judicial and legislative institutions among the American states. Building upon previous studies, we consider how judicial selection/accountability mechanisms affect the judicial-legislative separation of powers game. We specify game theoretic models that consider these issues. Our formal models demonstrate that judicial elections can empower courts by providing them with direct signals of legitimacy from …
Maga Trumps the Incumbency Advantage in a Dueling Incumbent Primary
Redistricting is the causal agent responsible for two incumbents facing off in U.S. House elections and hence, despite the rarity of these matchups, they occur periodically due to district boundary changes. In this article, we examine who wins a recent and highly competitive incumbent duel: the 2024 GOP primary in Alabama’s congressional district (CD) 1. Our assessment of this race marks the first academic study to marshal large-N survey data for…
Diversity in Judicial Leadership in the American States
Chief Justice Selection Rules and Judicial Ideology
We examine how institutional selection procedures affect the ideology of state supreme court chief justices. We argue that institutional selection methods empower those charged with choosing chief justices to select court leaders who reflect their own preferences, and we test this theory using data from all 50 American states from 1970 to 2017. Our results show that states that use popular elections to select chief justices tend to produce court …
Updating Pajid Scores for State Supreme Court Justices (1970–2019)
We build upon Brace, Langer, and Hall’s (2000, The Journal of Politics 62: 387–413) original measure of American state supreme court justice ideology – the PAJID scores. To do so, we gather new data on 1,666 state supreme court justices who served between 1970 and 2019 and update the PAJID scores throughout this period. Testing indicates that PAJID scores are a valid measure of state supreme court justices’ policy preferences and compare favorabl…
Judicial Institutions and the Political Economy of Retirements
Does Local Journalism Stimulate Voter Participation in State Supreme Court Elections
I gather new data on local media coverage of state supreme court elections and examine its effects on voter participation. I find that, even when controlling for campaign expense and advertising, media coverage can increase voter engagement in state supreme court contests. While some of this effect is attributable to salient campaigns themselves, content and statistical analyses show that the media provide voters with unique information such as c…
Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline
International Relations (IR) scholars uncritically accept the official narrative regarding the events of 9/11 and refuse to examine the massive body of evidence generated by the 9/11 truth movement. Nevertheless, as calls for a new inquiry into the events of 9/11 continue to mount, with the International 9/11 Consensus Panel and World Trade Centre Building 7 Evaluation inquiries having recently published their findings, and with a U.S. Federal Gr…
Revisiting Senatorial Courtesy and the Selection of Judges to the U.S. Courts of Appeals
We examine how elite attitudes and institutional rules and norms affect appointments to lower federal courts. Using voting data from 1,339 U.S. Courts of Appeals cases, we estimate new ideological measures for 475 individual circuit judges appointed between 1913 and 2008. We find that both presidential and home-state senators’ preferences strongly predict judicial ideology. While we find evidence that conditions of senatorial courtesy can constra…
The Chief Justice as Effective Administrative Leader
Objectives We examine the conditions under which the Chief Justice of the United States achieves congressional approval for his requests for institutional reforms to the federal courts. Specifically, we investigate whether legislators are more likely to enact these requests when they are limited in scope and members of Congress are similar ideologically to the chief justice or federal judiciary. Methods Our analysis uses the chief justice's Year‐…
New-Style Campaigns in State Supreme Court Retention Elections
Scholarly research finds that partisan, hard-fought, expensive, and churlish state supreme court campaigns increase voter participation and their support for challenger candidates. These insights, however, are drawn nearly exclusively from competitive state supreme court elections. Little is known about voter behavior in uncompetitive retention elections. Traditionally, these races are not salient to the public given that incumbents raise and spe…
DNA methylation of methylation complex genes in relation to stress and genome‐wide methylation in mother–newborn dyads
OBJECTIVES: Early life stress is known to have enduring biological effects, particularly with respect to health. Epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation, are a possible mechanism to mediate the biological effect of stress. We previously found correlations between maternal stress, newborn birthweight, and genome-wide measures of DNA methylation. Here we investigate ten genes related to the methylation/demethylation complex in order to be…
The Politics of the U.S. Federal Judiciary's Requests for Institutional Reform
Objectives We ask whether the requests the federal judiciary makes to Congress are conditioned either on political factors or on its actual institutional needs. Methods . We build a new measure of the yearly well‐being of the federal courts from 1978 through 2013 using factor analysis. We specify two formal models to generate testable hypotheses that help to untangle equilibria behavior resulting from competing claims on judicial preferences for …
Renaissance Catholicism and Contemporary Liberalism
Contemporary (post‐1945) liberalism functions analogously to R oman C atholicism in the decades after 1443. Both ideologies, in their respective periods, represent the hegemonic ideology of W estern civilization, despite the fact that both comprise a miscellany of competing belief systems. Both ideologies are dominated by a single hegemonic power—the U nited S tates and the R enaissance papacy, respectively—which strives for doctrinal stability. …
Modernity and the State
Modernity and the State: A Dialogue Between Empire, Multitude and a Shield of Achilles David A. Hughes (bio) Amidst the recent melee about globalization, two voices in particular have commanded considerable attention: those of Philip Bobbitt on the right and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on the left. Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles (2002) was lauded in the conservative press as “an audacious, massively informed analysis of the nature of the mo…
Trust Principles and the Operation of a Trust-Controlled Corporation
New-Style Campaigns in State Supreme Court Retention Elections
Scholarly research finds that partisan, hard-fought, expensive, and churlish state supreme court campaigns increase voter participation and their support for challenger candidates. These insights, however, are drawn nearly exclusively from competitive state supreme court elections. Little is known about voter behavior in uncompetitive retention elections. Traditionally, these races are not salient to the public given that incumbents raise and spe…
Updating Pajid Scores for State Supreme Court Justices (1970–2019)
We build upon Brace, Langer, and Hall’s (2000, The Journal of Politics 62: 387–413) original measure of American state supreme court justice ideology – the PAJID scores. To do so, we gather new data on 1,666 state supreme court justices who served between 1970 and 2019 and update the PAJID scores throughout this period. Testing indicates that PAJID scores are a valid measure of state supreme court justices’ policy preferences and compare favorabl…
Chief Justice Selection Rules and Judicial Ideology
We examine how institutional selection procedures affect the ideology of state supreme court chief justices. We argue that institutional selection methods empower those charged with choosing chief justices to select court leaders who reflect their own preferences, and we test this theory using data from all 50 American states from 1970 to 2017. Our results show that states that use popular elections to select chief justices tend to produce court …
Diversity in Judicial Leadership in the American States
Judicial Institutions and the Political Economy of Retirements
DNA methylation of methylation complex genes in relation to stress and genome‐wide methylation in mother–newborn dyads
OBJECTIVES: Early life stress is known to have enduring biological effects, particularly with respect to health. Epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation, are a possible mechanism to mediate the biological effect of stress. We previously found correlations between maternal stress, newborn birthweight, and genome-wide measures of DNA methylation. Here we investigate ten genes related to the methylation/demethylation complex in order to be…
Does Local Journalism Stimulate Voter Participation in State Supreme Court Elections
I gather new data on local media coverage of state supreme court elections and examine its effects on voter participation. I find that, even when controlling for campaign expense and advertising, media coverage can increase voter engagement in state supreme court contests. While some of this effect is attributable to salient campaigns themselves, content and statistical analyses show that the media provide voters with unique information such as c…
Revisiting Senatorial Courtesy and the Selection of Judges to the U.S. Courts of Appeals
We examine how elite attitudes and institutional rules and norms affect appointments to lower federal courts. Using voting data from 1,339 U.S. Courts of Appeals cases, we estimate new ideological measures for 475 individual circuit judges appointed between 1913 and 2008. We find that both presidential and home-state senators’ preferences strongly predict judicial ideology. While we find evidence that conditions of senatorial courtesy can constra…
Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline
International Relations (IR) scholars uncritically accept the official narrative regarding the events of 9/11 and refuse to examine the massive body of evidence generated by the 9/11 truth movement. Nevertheless, as calls for a new inquiry into the events of 9/11 continue to mount, with the International 9/11 Consensus Panel and World Trade Centre Building 7 Evaluation inquiries having recently published their findings, and with a U.S. Federal Gr…
The Chief Justice as Effective Administrative Leader
Objectives We examine the conditions under which the Chief Justice of the United States achieves congressional approval for his requests for institutional reforms to the federal courts. Specifically, we investigate whether legislators are more likely to enact these requests when they are limited in scope and members of Congress are similar ideologically to the chief justice or federal judiciary. Methods Our analysis uses the chief justice's Year‐…
The Politics of the U.S. Federal Judiciary's Requests for Institutional Reform
Objectives We ask whether the requests the federal judiciary makes to Congress are conditioned either on political factors or on its actual institutional needs. Methods . We build a new measure of the yearly well‐being of the federal courts from 1978 through 2013 using factor analysis. We specify two formal models to generate testable hypotheses that help to untangle equilibria behavior resulting from competing claims on judicial preferences for …
Trust Principles and the Operation of a Trust-Controlled Corporation
Modernity and the State
Modernity and the State: A Dialogue Between Empire, Multitude and a Shield of Achilles David A. Hughes (bio) Amidst the recent melee about globalization, two voices in particular have commanded considerable attention: those of Philip Bobbitt on the right and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on the left. Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles (2002) was lauded in the conservative press as “an audacious, massively informed analysis of the nature of the mo…
Renaissance Catholicism and Contemporary Liberalism
Contemporary (post‐1945) liberalism functions analogously to R oman C atholicism in the decades after 1443. Both ideologies, in their respective periods, represent the hegemonic ideology of W estern civilization, despite the fact that both comprise a miscellany of competing belief systems. Both ideologies are dominated by a single hegemonic power—the U nited S tates and the R enaissance papacy, respectively—which strives for doctrinal stability. …
The Politics of the U.S. Federal Judiciary's Requests for Institutional Reform
Objectives We ask whether the requests the federal judiciary makes to Congress are conditioned either on political factors or on its actual institutional needs. Methods . We build a new measure of the yearly well‐being of the federal courts from 1978 through 2013 using factor analysis. We specify two formal models to generate testable hypotheses that help to untangle equilibria behavior resulting from competing claims on judicial preferences for …
DNA methylation of methylation complex genes in relation to stress and genome‐wide methylation in mother–newborn dyads
OBJECTIVES: Early life stress is known to have enduring biological effects, particularly with respect to health. Epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation, are a possible mechanism to mediate the biological effect of stress. We previously found correlations between maternal stress, newborn birthweight, and genome-wide measures of DNA methylation. Here we investigate ten genes related to the methylation/demethylation complex in order to be…
The Chief Justice as Effective Administrative Leader
Objectives We examine the conditions under which the Chief Justice of the United States achieves congressional approval for his requests for institutional reforms to the federal courts. Specifically, we investigate whether legislators are more likely to enact these requests when they are limited in scope and members of Congress are similar ideologically to the chief justice or federal judiciary. Methods Our analysis uses the chief justice's Year‐…
New-Style Campaigns in State Supreme Court Retention Elections
Scholarly research finds that partisan, hard-fought, expensive, and churlish state supreme court campaigns increase voter participation and their support for challenger candidates. These insights, however, are drawn nearly exclusively from competitive state supreme court elections. Little is known about voter behavior in uncompetitive retention elections. Traditionally, these races are not salient to the public given that incumbents raise and spe…
Does Local Journalism Stimulate Voter Participation in State Supreme Court Elections
I gather new data on local media coverage of state supreme court elections and examine its effects on voter participation. I find that, even when controlling for campaign expense and advertising, media coverage can increase voter engagement in state supreme court contests. While some of this effect is attributable to salient campaigns themselves, content and statistical analyses show that the media provide voters with unique information such as c…
Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline
International Relations (IR) scholars uncritically accept the official narrative regarding the events of 9/11 and refuse to examine the massive body of evidence generated by the 9/11 truth movement. Nevertheless, as calls for a new inquiry into the events of 9/11 continue to mount, with the International 9/11 Consensus Panel and World Trade Centre Building 7 Evaluation inquiries having recently published their findings, and with a U.S. Federal Gr…
Revisiting Senatorial Courtesy and the Selection of Judges to the U.S. Courts of Appeals
We examine how elite attitudes and institutional rules and norms affect appointments to lower federal courts. Using voting data from 1,339 U.S. Courts of Appeals cases, we estimate new ideological measures for 475 individual circuit judges appointed between 1913 and 2008. We find that both presidential and home-state senators’ preferences strongly predict judicial ideology. While we find evidence that conditions of senatorial courtesy can constra…
Judicial Institutions and the Political Economy of Retirements
Chief Justice Selection Rules and Judicial Ideology
We examine how institutional selection procedures affect the ideology of state supreme court chief justices. We argue that institutional selection methods empower those charged with choosing chief justices to select court leaders who reflect their own preferences, and we test this theory using data from all 50 American states from 1970 to 2017. Our results show that states that use popular elections to select chief justices tend to produce court …
Updating Pajid Scores for State Supreme Court Justices (1970–2019)
We build upon Brace, Langer, and Hall’s (2000, The Journal of Politics 62: 387–413) original measure of American state supreme court justice ideology – the PAJID scores. To do so, we gather new data on 1,666 state supreme court justices who served between 1970 and 2019 and update the PAJID scores throughout this period. Testing indicates that PAJID scores are a valid measure of state supreme court justices’ policy preferences and compare favorabl…
Maga Trumps the Incumbency Advantage in a Dueling Incumbent Primary
Redistricting is the causal agent responsible for two incumbents facing off in U.S. House elections and hence, despite the rarity of these matchups, they occur periodically due to district boundary changes. In this article, we examine who wins a recent and highly competitive incumbent duel: the 2024 GOP primary in Alabama’s congressional district (CD) 1. Our assessment of this race marks the first academic study to marshal large-N survey data for…
Diversity in Judicial Leadership in the American States
The Evolution of State Courts Research in the Twenty-First Century
This review essay documents research on state courts throughout the last 25 years, tracking many of the important changes affecting state courts. Since State Politics & Policy Quarterly ( SPPQ ) began publication in 2001, research on state courts has evaluated a diverse range of topics, including traditionally important areas like the decisions of state judges, the effectiveness of elections for promoting accountability, public attitudes toward s…
Judicial Institutions, Independence, and the Separation of Powers
We study the separation of powers between judicial and legislative institutions among the American states. Building upon previous studies, we consider how judicial selection/accountability mechanisms affect the judicial-legislative separation of powers game. We specify game theoretic models that consider these issues. Our formal models demonstrate that judicial elections can empower courts by providing them with direct signals of legitimacy from …
Political science (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (7 works) · State (computer science (7 works) · Ideology (6 works) · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems (6 works) · Supreme court (6 works)