Politics from the Bench? Ideology and Strategic Voting in the US Supreme Court

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Clark, Tom S.; Montagnes, B. Pablo; Spenkuch, Joerg L.
• 署名单位: Emory University; Northwestern University; Northwestern University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2022.104726
• 发表日期: 2022
• 关键词: Strategic voting; ideology; Supreme Court; Expressive preferences; Instrumental preferences

摘要

In the United States, Supreme Court justices often vote along ideological lines. Why this is the case remains incompletely understood. To learn more about justices' preferences and the nature of decision-making in the Court, we differentiate between votes that were pivotal and those that were not. We find that in situations in which a justice is pivotal, her ideology is even more predictive of her vote than usual, especially when her choice matters for unambiguously establishing legal precedent. To interpret this previously unknown pattern in the data, we develop a model of voting in which justices have both expressive and instrumental preferences. That is, the justices strategically trade off which lit-igant should prevail based on the merits of a case with their desire to shape precedent.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.