Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-27T21:04:56.302Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Personal Attribute Models of the Voting Behavior of U.S. Supreme Court Justices: Liberalism in Civil Liberties and Economics Decisions, 1946–1978

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

C. Neal Tate
C. Neal Tate*
Affiliation:
North Texas State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The prevailing view among students of judicial politics is that judges' background characteristics or personal attributes cannot provide satisfactory explanations for variation in their decision-making behavior. Parsimonious attribute models reported here account for 70 to 90 percent of the variance in the voting of postwar Supreme Court justices in split decisions concerning civil rights and liberties, and economics. Seven variables representing six meaningful and easily interpretable concepts achieve this success. The concepts are Judge's Party Identification, Appointing President, Prestige of Prelaw Education (economics only), Appointed from Elective Office, Appointment Region (civil liberties only), Extensiveness of Judicial Experience, and Type of Prosecutorial Experience. The impressive performance of these models is attributed to superior measurement, operationalization, and model building; to a greater similarity between personal attribute models and more fully specified ones than has been assumed; and to the possibility that the attitudes which intervene between the personal attributes and the voting of judges are causally very closely linked to voting.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , June 1981 , pp. 355 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1981

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abraham, Henry J. (1974). Justices and Presidents. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Abraham, Henry J. (1975). The Judicial Process: An Introductory Analysis of the Courts of the United States, England, and France, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Becker, Theodore L. (1970). Comparative Judicial Politics: The Political Functioning of Courts. Chicago: Rand McNally.Google Scholar
Bowen, Don R. (1965). “The Explanation of Judicial Voting from Sociological Characteristics of Judges.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University.Google Scholar
Danelski, David J. (1966). “Values as Variables in Judicial Decision-Making: Notes Toward a Theory.” Vanderbilt Law Review 19: 721–40.Google Scholar
Gibson, James L. (1978). “Judges' Role Orientations, Attitudes, and Decisions: An Interactive Model.” American Political Science Review 71: 911–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, Sheldon (1966). “Voting Behavior on the United States Courts of Appeals, 1961-1964.” American Political Science Review 60: 374–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, Sheldon (1975). “Voting Behavior on the United States Courts of Appeals Revisited.” American Political Science Review 69: 491–506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, Sheldon, and Sarat, Austin, eds. (1978). American Court Systems: Readings in Judicial Process and Behavio. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.Google Scholar
Grossman, Joel B. (1966). “Social Backgrounds and Judicial Decision-Making.” Harvard Law Review 79: 1551–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holt, Robert T., and Turner, John, eds. (1970). The Methodology of Comparative Research. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Howard, J. Woodford (1977). “Role Perceptions and Behavior in Three U.S. Courts of Appeals.” Journal of Politics 39: 916–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnston, Richard E. (1976). “Supreme Court Voting Behavior: A Comparison of the Warren and Burger Courts.” In Peabody, Robert L. (ed.), Cases in American Politics. New York: Praeger, pp. 71–110.Google Scholar
Krislov, Samuel (1972). Judicial Process and Constitutional Law: A Laboratory Manual. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Lamb, Charles M. (1976). “Exploring the Conservatism of Federal Appeals Court Judges.” Indiana Law Journal 51: 257–79.Google Scholar
Lindstrom, Eugene Emit (1968). “Attributes Affecting the Voting Behavior of Supreme Court Justices: 1889-1959.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Murphy, Walter F., and Tanenhaus, Joseph (1972). The Study of Public Law. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Nagel, Stuart S. (1961). “Political Party Affiliations and Judges' Decisions.” American Political Science Review 55: 843–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagel, Stuart S. (1974). “Multiple Correlation of Judicial Back-grounds and Decisions.” Florida State University Law Review 2: 258–80.Google Scholar
Page, Benjamin I., and Jones, Calvin C. (1979). “Reciprocal Effects of Policy Preferences, Party Loyalties and the Vote.” American Political Science Review 73: 1071–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Przeworski, Adam, and Teune, Henry (1970). The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry. New York: Wiley-Interscience.Google Scholar
Rowland, Claude K., and Carp, Robert A. (1978). “The Influence of Background Characteristics on the Voting Behavior of Federal District Judges.” Presented at the annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York.Google Scholar
Ryan, John Paul, and Tate, C. Neal (1975). The Su-preme Court in American Politics: Policy Through Law. Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association.Google Scholar
Ryan, John Paul, and Tate, C. Neal (1980). The Supreme Court in American Politics: Policy Through Law, 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association.Google Scholar
Schmidhauser, John R. (1959). “The Justices of the Supreme Court: A Collective Portrait.” Midwest Journal of Political Science 3: 1–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scigliano, Robert (1971). The Supreme Court and the Presidency. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Schubert, Glendon (1959). Quantitative Analysis of Judicial Behavior. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.Google Scholar
Schubert, Glendon, ed. (1964). Judicial Behavior: A Reader in Theory and Research. Chicago: Rand McNally.Google Scholar
Schubert, Glendon. (1965). The Judicial Mind: Attitudes and Ideologies of Supreme Court Justices, 1946-1963. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Schubert, Glendon (1974). The Judicial Mind Revisited: Psychometric Analysis of Supreme Court Ideology. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Spaeth, Harold J. (1979). Supreme Court Policy Making: Explanation and Prediction. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.Google Scholar
Tate, C. Neal (1980). “The Centrality of Party in Voting Choice.” In Merkl, Peter H. (ed.), Western European Party Systems: Trends and Prospects. New York: Free Press, pp. 367–401.Google Scholar
Ulmer, S. Sidney (1962). “The Political Party Variable in the Michigan Supreme Court.” Journal of Public Law 11:352.Google Scholar
Ulmer, S. Sidney (1973a). “The Longitudinal Behavior of Hugo Lafayette Black: Parabolic Support for Civil Liberties, 1937-1971.” Florida Stale University Law Review 1: 131–53.Google Scholar
Ulmer, S. Sidney (1973b). “Social Background as an Indicator to the Votes of Supreme Court Justices in Criminal Cases: 1947-1956 Terms.” American Journal of Political Science 17: 622–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ulmer, S. Sidney (1979). “Parameters of Change in the Behavior of Supreme Court Justices: 1903-1973.” Presented at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association, Fort Worth.Google Scholar
Vines, Kenneth N. (1964). “Federal District Judges and Race Relations Cases in the South.” Journal of Politics 26: 338–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vines, Kenneth N. (1969). “The Judicial Role in the American Slates: An Exploration.” In Grossman, Joel B. and Tanenhaus, Joseph (eds.), Frontiers of Judicial Research. New York: John Wiley, pp. 461–85.Google Scholar
Warwick, Donald P. and Osherson, Samuel, eds. (1973). Comparative Research Methods. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.