Jeffrey R Lax
Biographic Data
| ID | 918182 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey R Lax |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey R |
| FAMILY NAME | Lax |
| SIGNATURE | LAX J R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9887-5662 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1146 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Linked Fate, Linked Hate: Is Solidarity Against Anti-Asian Hate Possible
The Party or the Purse? Unequal Representation in the US Senate
Recent work on US policymaking argues that responsiveness to public opinion is distorted by money, in that the preferences of the rich matter much more than those of lower-income Americans. A second distortion-partisan biases in responsiveness-has been less well studied and is often ignored or downplayed in the literature on affluent influence. We are the first to evaluate, in tandem, these two potential distortions in representation. We do so us…
Gay Rights in Congress: Public Opinion and (Mis)representation
Journal Article Gay Rights in Congress: Public Opinion and (Mis)representation Get access Katherine Krimmel, Katherine Krimmel 1Katherine Krimmel is an assistant professor of political science at Boston University, Boston, MA, USA. Jeffrey R. Lax and Justin H. Phillips are associate professors of political science at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. For helpful comments, the authors thank Robert Erikson, John Kastellec, Kelly Rader, partic…
Are Survey Respondents Lying about Their Support for Same-Sex Marriage? Lessons from a List Experiment
Public opinion polls consistently show that a growing majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. Critics, however, raise the possibility that these polls are plagued by social desirability bias, and thereby may overstate public support for gay and lesbian rights. We test this proposition using a list experiment embedded in the 2013 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. List experiments afford respondents an anonymity that allows them to…
Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases
While Supreme Court cases are generally salient or important, some are many degrees more important than others. A wide range of theoretical and empirical work throughout the study of judicial politics implicates this varying salience. Some work considers salience a variable to be explained, perhaps with judicial behavior the explanatory factor. The currently dominant measure of salience is the existence of newspaper coverage of a decision, but de…
Bargaining Power in the Supreme Court: Evidence from Opinion Assignment and Vote Switching
How can we assess relative bargaining power within the Supreme Court? Justices cast two votes in every case, one during the initial conference and one on the final merits of the case. Between these two votes, a justice is assigned to draft the majority opinion. We argue that vote switching can be used to detect the power of opinion authors over opinion content. Bargaining models make different predictions for opinion content and therefore for whe…
Polarizing the Electoral Connection: Partisan Representation in Supreme Court Confirmation Politics
Do senators respond to the preferences of their state's median voter or only to the preferences of their copartisans? We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship so that scholars can distinguish between general and partisan responsiveness. We use this to study responsiveness in the context of Senate confirmation votes on Supreme Court nominees. We find that senators weight their partisan base far more…
Political Constraints on Legal Doctrine: How Hierarchy Shapes the Law
When higher court judges attempt to assert control over lower-court decision making, do such hierarchical politics shape legal doctrine? Using a "case-space" model of choice between determinate doctrines (rules) and more flexible doctrines (standards), I argue that the structure of doctrine affects the application of and compliance with doctrine by lower courts, and this in turn affects choice among doctrinal structures. Doctrinal choice, legal c…
The Democratic Deficit in the States
We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state‐level support for 39 policies across eight issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy‐specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also uncover a striking “democratic deficit”: policy is congru…
The New Judicial Politics of Legal Doctrine
A new judicial politics of legal doctrine has the potential to resolve foundational dilemmas and reconcile long-standing and counterproductive scholarly divisions by bringing together legal concerns and political science priorities. This doctrinal-politics approach highlights a relatively new formal apparatus known as the case-space model, and it invokes close ties between theoretical and empirical work and between the study of judicial behavior …
The Three Prongs of a Jurisprudential Regimes Test: A Response to Kritzer and Richards
Legal Constraints on Supreme Court Decision Making: Do Jurisprudential Regimes Exist
The founding debate of judicial politics—is Supreme Court decision making driven by law or politics? —remains at center stage. One influential line of attack involves the identification of jurisprudential regimes, stable patterns of case decisions based on the influence of case factors. The key test is whether the regime changes after a major precedent-setting decision, that is, whether the case factors are subsequently treated differently by the…
Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees
Does public opinion influence Supreme Court confirmation politics? We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll-call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of 10 recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We …
Legal Doctrine on Collegial Courts
Appellate courts, which have the most control over legal doctrine, tend to operate through collegial (multimember) decision making. How does this collegiality affect their choice of legal doctrine? Can decisions by appellate courts be expected to result in a meaningful collegial rule? How do such collegial rules differ from the rules of individual judges? We explore these questions and show that collegiality has important implications for the str…
How Should We Estimate Public Opinion in The States
We compare two approaches for estimating state‐level public opinion: disaggregation by state of national surveys and a simulation approach using multilevel modeling of individual opinion and poststratification by population share. We present the first systematic assessment of the predictive accuracy of each and give practical advice about when and how each method should be used. To do so, we use an original data set of over 100 surveys on gay rig…
Gay Rights in the States: Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness
We study the effects of policy-specific public opinion on state adoption of policies affecting gays and lesbians, and the factors that condition this relationship. Using national surveys and advances in opinion estimation, we create new estimates of state-level support for eight policies, including civil unions and nondiscrimination laws. We differentiate between responsiveness to opinion and congruence with opinion majorities. We find a high deg…
Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the US Supreme Court
We formulate a new game-theoretic model of bargaining on the US Supreme Court. In the model, a degree of monopoly power over policy endogenously accrues to the assigned writer despite an “open rule” permitting other justices to make counteroffers. We assume justices are motivated ultimately by a concern for judicial policy, but that the policy impact of an opinion depends partly on its persuasiveness, clarity, and craftsmanship—its legal quality.…
Constructing Legal Rules on Appellate Courts
Appellate courts make policy, not only by hearing cases themselves, but by establishing legal rules for the disposition of future cases. The problem is that such courts are generally multimember, or collegial, courts. If different judges prefer different rules, can a collegial court establish meaningful legal rules? Can preferences that take the form of legal rules be aggregated? I use a "case-space" model to show that there will exist a collegia…
Certiorari and compliance in the judicial hierarchy: Discretion, reputation and the rule of four
I develop a formal model of the interaction between auditing by the Supreme Court (certiorari) and compliance by the lower courts, presenting three challenges to the existing literature. First, I show that even discretionary certiorari (the Court can choose which cases to hear) only goes so far in inducing compliance. Second, the literature often treats the Court as a unitary actor, ignoring the Rule of Four (only four votes are needed to grant c…
Fair Division: A Format for the Debate on the Format of Debates
In 1960, a televised presidential debate, four of them in fact, occurred for the first time. This came to seem, despite initial expectations, a mere blip in electoral history until the debates of 1976. During the intervening era, strategic political maneuvering was limited almost solely to the question of whether to debate, the answer always being resoundingly negative. In 1964, 1968, and 1972, the front-runner declined the invitation to debate t…
Gay Rights in the States: Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness
We study the effects of policy-specific public opinion on state adoption of policies affecting gays and lesbians, and the factors that condition this relationship. Using national surveys and advances in opinion estimation, we create new estimates of state-level support for eight policies, including civil unions and nondiscrimination laws. We differentiate between responsiveness to opinion and congruence with opinion majorities. We find a high deg…
The Democratic Deficit in the States
We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state‐level support for 39 policies across eight issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy‐specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also uncover a striking “democratic deficit”: policy is congru…
How Should We Estimate Public Opinion in The States
We compare two approaches for estimating state‐level public opinion: disaggregation by state of national surveys and a simulation approach using multilevel modeling of individual opinion and poststratification by population share. We present the first systematic assessment of the predictive accuracy of each and give practical advice about when and how each method should be used. To do so, we use an original data set of over 100 surveys on gay rig…
Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees
Does public opinion influence Supreme Court confirmation politics? We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll-call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of 10 recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We …
The Party or the Purse? Unequal Representation in the US Senate
Recent work on US policymaking argues that responsiveness to public opinion is distorted by money, in that the preferences of the rich matter much more than those of lower-income Americans. A second distortion-partisan biases in responsiveness-has been less well studied and is often ignored or downplayed in the literature on affluent influence. We are the first to evaluate, in tandem, these two potential distortions in representation. We do so us…
The New Judicial Politics of Legal Doctrine
A new judicial politics of legal doctrine has the potential to resolve foundational dilemmas and reconcile long-standing and counterproductive scholarly divisions by bringing together legal concerns and political science priorities. This doctrinal-politics approach highlights a relatively new formal apparatus known as the case-space model, and it invokes close ties between theoretical and empirical work and between the study of judicial behavior …
Polarizing the Electoral Connection: Partisan Representation in Supreme Court Confirmation Politics
Do senators respond to the preferences of their state's median voter or only to the preferences of their copartisans? We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship so that scholars can distinguish between general and partisan responsiveness. We use this to study responsiveness in the context of Senate confirmation votes on Supreme Court nominees. We find that senators weight their partisan base far more…
Are Survey Respondents Lying about Their Support for Same-Sex Marriage? Lessons from a List Experiment
Public opinion polls consistently show that a growing majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. Critics, however, raise the possibility that these polls are plagued by social desirability bias, and thereby may overstate public support for gay and lesbian rights. We test this proposition using a list experiment embedded in the 2013 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. List experiments afford respondents an anonymity that allows them to…
Constructing Legal Rules on Appellate Courts
Appellate courts make policy, not only by hearing cases themselves, but by establishing legal rules for the disposition of future cases. The problem is that such courts are generally multimember, or collegial, courts. If different judges prefer different rules, can a collegial court establish meaningful legal rules? Can preferences that take the form of legal rules be aggregated? I use a "case-space" model to show that there will exist a collegia…
Gay Rights in Congress: Public Opinion and (Mis)representation
Journal Article Gay Rights in Congress: Public Opinion and (Mis)representation Get access Katherine Krimmel, Katherine Krimmel 1Katherine Krimmel is an assistant professor of political science at Boston University, Boston, MA, USA. Jeffrey R. Lax and Justin H. Phillips are associate professors of political science at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. For helpful comments, the authors thank Robert Erikson, John Kastellec, Kelly Rader, partic…
Political Constraints on Legal Doctrine: How Hierarchy Shapes the Law
When higher court judges attempt to assert control over lower-court decision making, do such hierarchical politics shape legal doctrine? Using a "case-space" model of choice between determinate doctrines (rules) and more flexible doctrines (standards), I argue that the structure of doctrine affects the application of and compliance with doctrine by lower courts, and this in turn affects choice among doctrinal structures. Doctrinal choice, legal c…
Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases
While Supreme Court cases are generally salient or important, some are many degrees more important than others. A wide range of theoretical and empirical work throughout the study of judicial politics implicates this varying salience. Some work considers salience a variable to be explained, perhaps with judicial behavior the explanatory factor. The currently dominant measure of salience is the existence of newspaper coverage of a decision, but de…
Legal Constraints on Supreme Court Decision Making: Do Jurisprudential Regimes Exist
The founding debate of judicial politics—is Supreme Court decision making driven by law or politics? —remains at center stage. One influential line of attack involves the identification of jurisprudential regimes, stable patterns of case decisions based on the influence of case factors. The key test is whether the regime changes after a major precedent-setting decision, that is, whether the case factors are subsequently treated differently by the…
Legal Doctrine on Collegial Courts
Appellate courts, which have the most control over legal doctrine, tend to operate through collegial (multimember) decision making. How does this collegiality affect their choice of legal doctrine? Can decisions by appellate courts be expected to result in a meaningful collegial rule? How do such collegial rules differ from the rules of individual judges? We explore these questions and show that collegiality has important implications for the str…
Bargaining Power in the Supreme Court: Evidence from Opinion Assignment and Vote Switching
How can we assess relative bargaining power within the Supreme Court? Justices cast two votes in every case, one during the initial conference and one on the final merits of the case. Between these two votes, a justice is assigned to draft the majority opinion. We argue that vote switching can be used to detect the power of opinion authors over opinion content. Bargaining models make different predictions for opinion content and therefore for whe…
The Three Prongs of a Jurisprudential Regimes Test: A Response to Kritzer and Richards
Fair Division: A Format for the Debate on the Format of Debates
In 1960, a televised presidential debate, four of them in fact, occurred for the first time. This came to seem, despite initial expectations, a mere blip in electoral history until the debates of 1976. During the intervening era, strategic political maneuvering was limited almost solely to the question of whether to debate, the answer always being resoundingly negative. In 1964, 1968, and 1972, the front-runner declined the invitation to debate t…
Certiorari and compliance in the judicial hierarchy: Discretion, reputation and the rule of four
I develop a formal model of the interaction between auditing by the Supreme Court (certiorari) and compliance by the lower courts, presenting three challenges to the existing literature. First, I show that even discretionary certiorari (the Court can choose which cases to hear) only goes so far in inducing compliance. Second, the literature often treats the Court as a unitary actor, ignoring the Rule of Four (only four votes are needed to grant c…
Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the US Supreme Court
We formulate a new game-theoretic model of bargaining on the US Supreme Court. In the model, a degree of monopoly power over policy endogenously accrues to the assigned writer despite an “open rule” permitting other justices to make counteroffers. We assume justices are motivated ultimately by a concern for judicial policy, but that the policy impact of an opinion depends partly on its persuasiveness, clarity, and craftsmanship—its legal quality.…
Constructing Legal Rules on Appellate Courts
Appellate courts make policy, not only by hearing cases themselves, but by establishing legal rules for the disposition of future cases. The problem is that such courts are generally multimember, or collegial, courts. If different judges prefer different rules, can a collegial court establish meaningful legal rules? Can preferences that take the form of legal rules be aggregated? I use a "case-space" model to show that there will exist a collegia…
Legal Doctrine on Collegial Courts
Appellate courts, which have the most control over legal doctrine, tend to operate through collegial (multimember) decision making. How does this collegiality affect their choice of legal doctrine? Can decisions by appellate courts be expected to result in a meaningful collegial rule? How do such collegial rules differ from the rules of individual judges? We explore these questions and show that collegiality has important implications for the str…
How Should We Estimate Public Opinion in The States
We compare two approaches for estimating state‐level public opinion: disaggregation by state of national surveys and a simulation approach using multilevel modeling of individual opinion and poststratification by population share. We present the first systematic assessment of the predictive accuracy of each and give practical advice about when and how each method should be used. To do so, we use an original data set of over 100 surveys on gay rig…
Gay Rights in the States: Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness
We study the effects of policy-specific public opinion on state adoption of policies affecting gays and lesbians, and the factors that condition this relationship. Using national surveys and advances in opinion estimation, we create new estimates of state-level support for eight policies, including civil unions and nondiscrimination laws. We differentiate between responsiveness to opinion and congruence with opinion majorities. We find a high deg…
The Three Prongs of a Jurisprudential Regimes Test: A Response to Kritzer and Richards
Legal Constraints on Supreme Court Decision Making: Do Jurisprudential Regimes Exist
The founding debate of judicial politics—is Supreme Court decision making driven by law or politics? —remains at center stage. One influential line of attack involves the identification of jurisprudential regimes, stable patterns of case decisions based on the influence of case factors. The key test is whether the regime changes after a major precedent-setting decision, that is, whether the case factors are subsequently treated differently by the…
Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees
Does public opinion influence Supreme Court confirmation politics? We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll-call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of 10 recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We …
The New Judicial Politics of Legal Doctrine
A new judicial politics of legal doctrine has the potential to resolve foundational dilemmas and reconcile long-standing and counterproductive scholarly divisions by bringing together legal concerns and political science priorities. This doctrinal-politics approach highlights a relatively new formal apparatus known as the case-space model, and it invokes close ties between theoretical and empirical work and between the study of judicial behavior …
Political Constraints on Legal Doctrine: How Hierarchy Shapes the Law
When higher court judges attempt to assert control over lower-court decision making, do such hierarchical politics shape legal doctrine? Using a "case-space" model of choice between determinate doctrines (rules) and more flexible doctrines (standards), I argue that the structure of doctrine affects the application of and compliance with doctrine by lower courts, and this in turn affects choice among doctrinal structures. Doctrinal choice, legal c…
The Democratic Deficit in the States
We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state‐level support for 39 policies across eight issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy‐specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also uncover a striking “democratic deficit”: policy is congru…
Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases
While Supreme Court cases are generally salient or important, some are many degrees more important than others. A wide range of theoretical and empirical work throughout the study of judicial politics implicates this varying salience. Some work considers salience a variable to be explained, perhaps with judicial behavior the explanatory factor. The currently dominant measure of salience is the existence of newspaper coverage of a decision, but de…
Bargaining Power in the Supreme Court: Evidence from Opinion Assignment and Vote Switching
How can we assess relative bargaining power within the Supreme Court? Justices cast two votes in every case, one during the initial conference and one on the final merits of the case. Between these two votes, a justice is assigned to draft the majority opinion. We argue that vote switching can be used to detect the power of opinion authors over opinion content. Bargaining models make different predictions for opinion content and therefore for whe…
Polarizing the Electoral Connection: Partisan Representation in Supreme Court Confirmation Politics
Do senators respond to the preferences of their state's median voter or only to the preferences of their copartisans? We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship so that scholars can distinguish between general and partisan responsiveness. We use this to study responsiveness in the context of Senate confirmation votes on Supreme Court nominees. We find that senators weight their partisan base far more…
Gay Rights in Congress: Public Opinion and (Mis)representation
Journal Article Gay Rights in Congress: Public Opinion and (Mis)representation Get access Katherine Krimmel, Katherine Krimmel 1Katherine Krimmel is an assistant professor of political science at Boston University, Boston, MA, USA. Jeffrey R. Lax and Justin H. Phillips are associate professors of political science at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. For helpful comments, the authors thank Robert Erikson, John Kastellec, Kelly Rader, partic…
Are Survey Respondents Lying about Their Support for Same-Sex Marriage? Lessons from a List Experiment
Public opinion polls consistently show that a growing majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. Critics, however, raise the possibility that these polls are plagued by social desirability bias, and thereby may overstate public support for gay and lesbian rights. We test this proposition using a list experiment embedded in the 2013 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. List experiments afford respondents an anonymity that allows them to…
The Party or the Purse? Unequal Representation in the US Senate
Recent work on US policymaking argues that responsiveness to public opinion is distorted by money, in that the preferences of the rich matter much more than those of lower-income Americans. A second distortion-partisan biases in responsiveness-has been less well studied and is often ignored or downplayed in the literature on affluent influence. We are the first to evaluate, in tandem, these two potential distortions in representation. We do so us…
Linked Fate, Linked Hate: Is Solidarity Against Anti-Asian Hate Possible
Political science (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (12 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (8 works) · Law and economics (8 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (8 works) · Public opinion (8 works) · Supreme court (8 works)