Institutional Cohesion in the High Court of Australia: Do American Theories Travel Well Down Under?

Abstract

Political scientists pay consistent attention to the institutional cohesion of the US Supreme Court; that is, the extent to which and conditions under which the judges collaborate to write joint or unanimous judgments. This article tests whether factors that explain cohesion in the US Supreme Court are relevant in other Anglo-derived judicial systems. It tracks variation in judgment writing patterns on the Australian High Court from 1940 to 2002 and assesses the individual, institutional, and political forces that influence its cohesion. The article concludes that much of the Supreme Court scholarship has explanatory power in the Australian context, but that comparative court scholars must be attentive to the idiosyncrasies of particular courts when developing generalisable theories on court cohesion.