Strategies in Certiorari Voting on the United States Supreme Court

Abstract

Do justices on the United States Supreme Court pursue strategies in their certiorari voting? We inspected seven terms from the Vinson, Warren, and Burger Courts and discovered that the justices use the error correcting, prediction, and majority strategies, particularly when the strategies are consistent with each other. Such use is not indiscriminate but usually is tempered by the presence of adverse conditions. We also investigated the error correcting and prediction strategies through the focus of liberal and conservative justices in liberal and conservative courts. These two strategies and their combination work best for conservative justices in conservative courts. Liberal justices in liberal courts are substantially more grant prone than conservative justices in conservative courts.