[gov3009-l] Lauderdale: “There Are Many Median Justices on the Supreme Court”

Hi all, We hope that you can join us for the final Applied Statistics Workshop of the year this Wednesday, April 27th when we will be happy to have Benjamin Lauderdale, currently a College Fellow in the Department of Government, Harvard University and soon to be at the London School of Economics. You will find an abstract below. As always, we will serve a light lunch and the talk will begin around 12:15p. “There Are Many Median Justices on the Supreme Court” Benjamin Lauderdale Department of Government, Harvard University CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.) Wednesday, April 27th, 2011 12 noon Abstract: While unidimensional preference estimates for the U.S. Supreme Court exist in both constant and time-varying forms, estimating variation in preferences across areas of the law has been difficult because multidimensional scaling models perform poorly with only nine voters. We introduce a new approach to recovering estimates of judicial preferences that are localized to particular legal issues as well as periods of time. Using expert issue area codes and majority opinion citations to identify the strength of substantive relationships between cases, we apply a kernel-weighted optimal classification estimator to analyze how justices' preference vary across both areas of the law and time. Allowing for issue-variation in preferences improves the predictive power of estimated preference orderings more than allowing for time-variation. We find substantial variation in the identity of the median justice across areas of the law during most periods of the modern court, suggesting a need to reconsider empirical and theoretical research that hinges on the existence of a unitary and well-identified median justice. Cheers, matt. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Matthew Blackwell PhD Candidate Institute for Quantitative Social Science Department of Government Harvard University url: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~blackwel/