Modeling Supreme Court Strategic Decision Making: The Congressional Constraint
By Mario E. Bergara, Barak D. Richman, P. Spiller. 2003
123 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper addresses the contradictory results obtained in Segal (1997) and Spiller and Gely (1992) concerning the impact of institutional constraints on the US Supreme Court decisionmaking. by adapting the Spiller and Gely model to the data set utilized by Segal. The major findings are as follows: first, by adapting the Spiller and Gely (1992) maximum likelihood model to the Segal (1997) dataset, we find support for the hypothesis that the Court adjusts its decisions to Presidential and congressional preferences. Second, data from 1947-92 indicate that the average probability of the Court being constrained has been approximately one third. Third, we show that the results obtained in Segal (1997) are the product of biases introduced by a misspecified econometric model. Finally, the estimation highlights the usefulness of Krehbiel’s model of legislative decision-making.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e37eebf39ea026e336b92f2860b5d3edbf0609de
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Citations in the corpus
- Constitutional Courts in Comparative Perspective: A Theoretical Assessment (2015, background): “Numerous studies suggest that the US Supreme Court, often considered to be one of the most independent and powerful constitutional courts, is responsive to presidential and congressional preferences (e.g., Bergara et al. 2003, Harvey & Friedman 2006, Clark 2011; but see Segal 1997).”