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Institutions and Equilibrium in the United States Supreme Court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2007

ROBERT ANDERSON IV  and
ALEXANDER M. TAHK
ROBERT ANDERSON IV
Affiliation:
Pepperdine University and Stanford University
ALEXANDER M. TAHK
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

Over the last decade the scholarship on judicial politics has increasingly emphasized the strategic aspects of decision making in the United States Supreme Court. This scholarship, however, has struggled with two significant limitations—the restriction to unidimensional policy spaces and the assumption of binary comparisons of alternatives. These two assumptions have the advantage of implying stable, predictable outcomes, but lack a sound theoretical foundation and assume away potentially important aspects of strategic behavior on the Court. In this article, we identify institutional features of the Court that, under certain conditions, allow us to relax these two assumptions without sacrificing stable, predictable policy outcomes. In particular, we formalize the “part-by-part” opinion voting used by the justices, a feature that, together with separable preferences over policy issues, implies stable policy outcomes around the issue-by-issue median of the justices.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 101 , Issue 4 , November 2007 , pp. 811 - 825
Copyright
© 2007 by the American Political Science Association

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