The Three Prongs of a Jurisprudential Regimes Test: A Response to Kritzer and Richards

Abstract

I n ‘‘Legal Constraints on Supreme Court Decision Making: Do Jurisprudential Regimes Exist?’’, we explored whether one can say that jurisprudential regime change occurred in Supreme Court decision making—whether key legal precedents led to changes in how justices voted. We found that the standard test, a Chow test of coefficient change, used in Kritzer and Richards’s research design, is strikingly overconfident in finding that a change has occurred in voting across cases before and after the precedent. Rather than making a Type-1 error of finding regime change when none exists 5% of the time, the test does so sometimes close to 100% of the time, even though the data has been randomly shuffled so that no systematic difference can exist between the before and after cases. We appreciate Kritzer and Richards’s openmindedness about our inquiry into their findings and are grateful for their thoughtful responses (now and while we worked on our original paper). We also appreciate the opportunity to clarify our findings, respond to their arguments (old and new), and to present supplemental results that answer, we hope, the questions they raised. Kritzer and Richards state that our paper focuses on only one of the three prongs of their argument, the significance test of regime change, whereas they now clarify that the second and third elements are actually of great (greater?) importance. They have also supplemented their findings with a more sophisticated test of regime change. We discuss each of these three components, including their new statistical evidence, below.