Policy Content on the U.S. Supreme Court: A View from the States

Abstract

ABSTRACTMcGuire et al. (2009) set out to develop a better measure of the policy content of the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions. They justify their measure using a formal model, which they test empirically. This empirical test, however, omits all cases that arrived at the Court on appeal from the state supreme courts. We argue that there are plausible reasons to believe that the decision calculus modeled by these authors may vary when considering cases that are appealed from the states and, thus, that McGuire et al.'s empirical results may not hold in the state context. This article tests that proposition. Our results diverge from those found in national courts and have significant implications for scholars of state and national political institutions, public policy, and judicial politics.