On Separation of Powers and Obfuscation in U.S. Supreme Court Opinions
A longstanding debate in American judicial politics concerns whether the U.S. Supreme Court anticipates or responds to the possibility that Congress will override its decisions. A recent theory proposes that opinions that are relatively hard to read are more costly for Congress to review—and that as a result, the Court can decrease the likelihood of override from a hostile Congress by obfuscating its opinions: writing opinions that are less readable when congressional review is a threat. I derive a straightforward but novel empirical implication of this theory; I then show that the implication does not in fact hold. This casts serious doubt on the claim that justices strategically obfuscate opinion language to avoid congressional override. I also discuss sentence tokenization as a source of measurement error in readability statistics for judicial opinions.
2023. Journal of Law & Courts. 11(2): 207–220. A draft is available here (pdf). Replication materials at journal’s Dataverse.
Aesthetic Preferences and Policy Preferences as Determinants of U.S. Supreme Court Writing Style (with Jeff Budziak)
Recent literature on writing style in U.S. Supreme Court opinions has focused on style as a means of furthering justices’ policy goals. In particular, an opinion’s clarity is proposed to make the implementation of the announced policy more likely. We give a formal argument that the observed distribution of opinion clarity is not easily reconcilable with justices who are striving to write clearly in service of policy implementation related goals; this is true even if there are case-level costs that sometimes make writing clearly more difficult. We propose that justices having aesthetic preferences—essentially, stylistic preferences over opinion language that are unrelated to policy implementation—that they weight heavily could explain the observed distribution of opinion clarity. Our analysis of some 4500 majority opinions 1955–2008 is largely consistent with our theoretical argument.
2023. Journal of Law & Courts. 11(1): 45–66. A draft is available here (pdf). Replication materials at journal’s Dataverse.
Justice-Level Heterogeneity in Certiorari Voting: The U.S. Supreme Court, October Terms 1939, 1968, 1982 (with Gregory Caldeira)
Though the literature on agenda-setting at the U.S. Supreme Court is sizable, justice-vote-level multivariate analyses of certiorari are almost exclusively limited to samples of discussed cases from 1986-1993. Moreover, these studies have done very little to explore justice-level heterogeneity on certiorari. Here, we present an initial effort to address these lacunae by analyzing the predictors of individual justices’ cert votes on all paid dockets from the 1939, 1968, and 1982 terms. We find substantial justice-level heterogeneity in the weight that justices place on the standard factors shaping the cert vote. We also show that some of this heterogeneity is associated with justice experience and ideological extremism, largely in theoretically predicted ways. In closing, we sound a note of caution on drawing conclusions about effects of justice attributes, when the number of justices is relatively small.
2022. Political Science Research & Methods. 10(4): 793–805. A draft is available here (pdf). Replication materials at journal’s Dataverse.
Mechanisms Underlying Familial Influence on Elite Political Behavior: Evidence from the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals (with Alyse Camacho)
This article contributes to the literature addressing family influences on elite political behavior. By empirically assessing the influence of sibling gender on judicial decision-making, we are able to present evidence on the mechanism by which child, sibling and other relatives’ gender may influence elite political behavior. We build on a dataset in Glynn and Sen (2015, AJPS) by mining various archival sources to compile data on the gender of circuit judges’ siblings. We find no evidence that male judges’ votes on so-called “women’s issues” (employment discrimination based on gender or pregnancy, reproductive rights/abortion, and Title IX) are affected by whether they have a sister, and we are able to rule out large effects of a sibling’s gender on male and female judges’ votes. Our results imply that the relationship between family member gender and elite political behavior is driven by the desire to avoid costs of discrimination, rather than learning from family members.
2022. Review of Law & Economics 18(1): 55–68. A draft is available here (pdf). Replication data and code for Stata is available here (zip).
The Prevalence of Articles on U.S. Judicial Behavior in Five Law & Courts Journals
A content analysis of the 2019 issues of five law and courts journals: Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Justice System Journal, Law & Social Inquiry, and Law & Society Review.
2020. Law & Courts Newsletter 30(2): 10–13. Available here (pdf); full newsletter is here (pdf).
Data is available here (dta) and Stata .do file is here.
Selection of Cases for Discussion: The U.S. Supreme Court, OT 1939, 1968, and 1982 (with Gregory Caldeira)
The first, hidden, stage of the Supreme Court’s agenda-setting process is the formation of the “discuss list,” the small set of cases actually considered in Conference. Yet, few have systematically considered the operation of and the influences on this critical, initial phase of decision-making. No systematic, empirical work makes comparisons over time of how features of cases shape the makeup of the Chief Justices discuss list. Here, we examine the composition of the discuss list through a multivariate analysis of all paid petitions for certiorari filed in October Term 1939, 1968, and 1982. We are thereby able to compare the tendencies and efficacy of three long-serving Chief Justices—Hughes, Warren, and Burger—in making up the discuss list. And, methodologically, we propose a novel alternative to the “observed values” and the “representative case” methods of calculating effect sizes for second differences, and present software to implement our proposal.
2020. Journal of Law & Courts 8(2): 381–395. Pre-print available here (pdf); published version here (external link).
A preliminary version (v. 0.6) of the associated Stata program sdcasepick is available here (ado). Help file here (sthlp). Feedback welcome; please check back for updates. Replication materials at journal’s Dataverse.
Determinants of Writing Style on the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals (with Jeffrey Budziak and Matthew P. Hitt)
A rapidly burgeoning literature in judicial politics concerns the variation in elements of writing style such as reading difficulty, cognitive complexity, affective language, and informality in judicial opinions. Some of these studies argue that judges strategically alter their writing style in anticipation of reactions from other actors. Others indicate that writing style is a function of judge characteristics as well as case-related factors. We investigate the correlates of writing style in United States Circuit Courts of Appeals by analyzing a stratified random sample consisting of 11,171 opinions. Construing style broadly to encompass several dimensions suggested by prior work, we find that case and judge characteristics explain substantially more variance in writing style than do strategic considerations.
2019. Journal of Law & Courts 7(1): 1–28. Pre-print available here (pdf); published version available here (external site). Replication materials at journal’s Dataverse.
On Evolutionary Game Theory and Team Reasoning
Evolutionary game theory has a lengthy history of modeling human interactions, and has been recently used to analyze the emergence and long-term viability of team reasoning. I review some basic elements of evolutionary analysis, and discuss a few issues attending evolutionary game theory’s importation from biology (where it was originally used to study genetic evolution of animal behavior) to the human sciences; in particular, I emphasize important differences between genetic and cultural evolution. After sketching a few fundamental results, I describe recent evolutionary analyses of team reasoning. Finally, I suggest some open lines of theoretical and empirical inquiry.
2018. Revue d’economie politique 128(3): 423–446. Draft available here (pdf); published version available here (external site).
Assessing Threats to Inference with Simultaneous Sensitivity Analysis: The Case of U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments (with Jeffrey Budziak)
Political scientists relying on observational data face substantial challenges in drawing causal inferences. A particularly problematic threat to inference is the unobserved confounder. As a means to assess this threat, we introduce simultaneous sensitivity analysis to the political science literature. As an application, we consider the potentially confounded relationship between Supreme Court justice voting and oral argument quality. We demonstrate that this relationship is sensitive to the presence of a confounder, to a degree that threatens inference, and explore the confounder both theoretically and empirically. More generally, we show how sensitivity analysis can guide inquiry related to a covariate that cannot be directly measured.
2018. Political Science Research & Methods 6(1): 33–56. Draft available here (pdf); published version available here (external site). Replication materials at journal’s Dataverse.
Simultaneous Sensitivity Analysis in Stata: pairsimsens and arsimsens
A simultaneous sensitivity analysis assesses how sensitive an inference of a non-zero treatment effect is to an unobserved confounder with a specified relationship to the treatment and response. Gastwirth et al. (1998) develops a method of simultaneous sensitivity analysis that can be used after 1:1 matching; Small et al. (2009) modifies the method so that it can be applied after 1:k and full matching. This paper describes the commands pairsimsens and arsimsens, which implement, respectively, the analyses of Gastwirth et al. (1998) and Small et al. (2009) in Stata. The .ado and .hlp files for the software presented in the paper are provided in a .zip file in the supplementary materials.
2015. Observational Studies 1: 74–90. Available here (pdf). Software and replication materials here (zip).
The Long-term Viability of Team Reasoning (with S.M. Amadae)
Team reasoning gives a simple, coherent, and rational explanation for human cooperative behavior (Bacharach 1999, Sugden 1993). This paper investigates the robustness of team reasoning as an explanation for cooperative behavior, by assessing its long-run viability. We consider an evolutionary game theoretic model in which the population consists of team reasoners and “conventional’’ individual reasoners. We find that changes in the ludic environment can affect evolutionary outcomes, and that in many circumstances, team reasoning may thrive, even under conditions that, at first glance, may seem unfavorable. We also pursue several extensions that augment the basic account, and conclude that team reasoning is an evolutionarily viable mechanism with the potential to explain behavior in a range of human interactions.
2015. Journal of Economic Methodology 22(4): 462–478. Draft available here (pdf); published version available here (external site).
2006 American National Election Studies Pilot Study Report, Modules 4 and 22.
This report assesses proposed survey items from the 2006 ANES, relating to respondents’ perceptions of fair treatment by police, and belief in a just world.
2007. ANES Pilot Study Report No. nes012058. Available here (pdf, external site). Sorry about the formatting etc.: I was a first-year…