Strategic behavior and policy choice on the U.S. Supreme Court / Thomas H. Hammond, Chris W. Bonneau, and Reginald S. Sheehan.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 289-293) and index.

Print version record.

Use copy Restrictions unspecified star MiAaHDL

Electronic reproduction. [S.l.] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. MiAaHDL

Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. MiAaHDL

http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212

digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures and Tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Part I: Theories of supreme court decision-making -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Seven Distinctions in the Literature -- 3 Assessing Previous Theories of Supreme Court Decision-Making -- Part II: A formal model of supreme court decision-making -- 4 Why Formal Models? -- 5 Definitions and Assumptions -- 6 Coalition Formation and the Final Vote -- 7 Opinion Assignment -- 8 The Conference Vote -- 9 Certiorari -- Part III: Future directions for theories of supreme court decision-making -- 10 Empirical Implications -- 11 Future Research -- Notes -- References -- Index

Despite several decades of research on Supreme Court decision-making by specialists in judicial politics, there is no good answer to a key question: if each justice's behavior on the Court were motivated solely by some kind of "liberal" or "conservative" ideology, what patterns should be expected in the Court's decision-making practices and in the Court's final decisions? It is only when these patterns are identified in advance that political scientists will be able to empirically evaluate theories which assert that the justices' behavior is motivated by the pursuit of their personal policy preferences. This book provides the first comprehensive and integrated model of how strategically rational Supreme Court justices should be expected to behave in all five stages of the Court's decision-making process. The authors' primary focus is on how each justice's wish to gain as desirable a final opinion as possible will affect his or her behavior at each stage of the decision-making process.

eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - Worldwide