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Selecting Cases for Supreme Court Review: An Underdog Model*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

S. Sidney Ulmer
S. Sidney Ulmer*
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
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Abstract

In making review decisions, Supreme Court justices are predisposed to support underdogs and upperdogs. disproportionately but, also, are motivated to hide any "bias" that may be at work in determining votes.

In balancing these two values, justices may be expected to vote their "bias" more frequently (1) when that vote will determine outcome, and (2) when the "bias" will be harder to detect. The latter goal may be served by voting the "bias" more frequently in close cases and less frequently otherwise.

In an analysis of the voting patterns of five justices in the decade 1947–56, I found that two liberal and two conservative justices conformed to these expectations. A fifth, or control justice, defined as neither liberal nor conservative, did not pattern his votes in the manner predicted for liberals and conservatives. This relationship held when four projected intervening variables were controlled individually and collectively.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , September 1978 , pp. 902 - 910
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1978

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Footnotes

*

Preparation of this article for publication has been supported by the National Science Foundation.

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