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The Supreme Court's Many Median Justices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2012

BENJAMIN E. LAUDERDALE  and
TOM S. CLARK
BENJAMIN E. LAUDERDALE*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
TOM S. CLARK*
Affiliation:
Emory University
*
Benjamin E. Lauderdale is Lecturer, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Columbia House, Houghton Street, London, UKWC2A 2AE (b.e.lauderdale@lse.ac.uk).
Tom S. Clark is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, 327 Tarbutton Hall, 1555 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322 (tom.clark@emory.edu).
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Abstract

One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across areas of the law, and that limitations in our ability to measure those preferences have constrained the set of questions scholars pursue. We introduce a new approach, which makes use of information about substantive similarity among cases, to estimate judicial preferences that vary across substantive legal issues and over time. We show that a model allowing preferences to vary over substantive issues as well as over time is a significantly better predictor of judicial behavior than one that only allows preferences to vary over time. We find that judicial preferences are not reducible to simple left-right ideology and, as a consequence, there is substantial variation in the identity of the median justice across areas of the law during all periods of the modern court. These results suggest a need to reconsider empirical and theoretical research that hinges on the existence of a single pivotal median justice.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 106 , Issue 4 , November 2012 , pp. 847 - 866
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2012

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