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The United States Supreme Court and Criminal Cases, 1935–1976: Alternative Models of Agenda Building

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Gregory A. Caldeira
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Perhaps the most important decisions that the United States Supreme Court makes consist of which sorts of issues it will entertain and how, when, and in what forms it will resolve them. Indeed, as Mr Justice Brandeis once remarked, the ‘most important thing [the Court does] is not doing’, i.e. winnowing cases. Yet, until quite recently, few studies focused on the politics of the agenda-building process on the Supreme Court. From the important researches of Tanenhaus and his associates and of Ulmer and his colleagues we know that under certain conditions and in certain cases the justices operate on the basis of a few ‘cues’ in decisions to grant or deny petitions for certiorari – the main mode of obtaining a hearing from the Court. And Ulmer has instructed us that in making choices on certiorari, ‘Supreme Court justices are predisposed to support underdogs and upperdogs disproportionately but, also, are motivated to hide any “bias” that may be at work in determining votes’. So, although we do know more about some segments of agenda building than before, investigations are still at a relatively early stage. Furthermore, few have treated the Supreme Court as an institution that operates across time as well as space or have accounted for variations in its behaviour across that temporal dimension.

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Articles
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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 1981 , pp. 449 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

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17 See Skogan, Wesley, ‘The Validity of Official Crime Statistics: An Empirical Investigation’, Social Science Quarterly, LV (1974), 25–38Google Scholar; and Skogan, Wesley, ‘Measurement Problems in Official and Survey Crime Rates’, Journal of Criminal Justice, III (1975), 17–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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19 Now it might have been preferable to use data on public responses to closed-ended questions, because then one could be certain that ‘public concern’ was autonomous, rather than the product perhaps of elite domination of the mass media. Unfortunately, however, relevant closed-ended data that are available derive from so diverse a set of queries and irregular times as to render them useless for present purposes.

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23 Thus use of regression in both time-series and cross-sectional studies assumes that ‘errors corresponding to different observations are uncorrelated… When the error terms from different observations are correlated, we say that the error process is serially correlated or autocorrelated’. Normally, ‘the presence of serial correlation will not affect the unbiasedness or consistency of the ordinary least-squares regression estimators, but it does affect their efficiency’. The tendency, then, is to reject the null hypothesis when it should not be rejected. See Pindyck, and Rubinfeld, , Econometric Models and Economic Forecasts, pp. 18, 107.Google Scholar

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32 United States v. Lee, 106 U.S. 196, 223 (1882).Google Scholar

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35 Cf. Hart, Henry, ‘Foreword: The Time Chart of the Justices’, Harvard Law Review, LXXIII (1959). 74–125Google Scholar; and Arnold, Thurman, ‘Professor Hart's Theology’, Harvard Law Review, LXXIII (1960), 1298–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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38 Decisions ‘on the merits’ include cases in which the Court meets the issues stated in the petitions head on, rather than using a procedural technique to dispose of the case.

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46 The fitted data in Figure 1 do not form the usual, straight line. This peculiarity arises from the correction for autocorrelation employed here. See Pindyck, and Rubinfeld, , Econometric Model and Economic Forecasts, pp. 108–13Google Scholar, for an excellent explanation.

47 See Walker, , ‘Setting the Agenda in the U.S. Senate: A Theory of Problem Selection’Google Scholar; Burstein, Paul and Freudenberg, William, ‘Changing Public Policy: The Impact of War Costs, Public Opinion, and Anti-War Demonstrations on Vietnam War Motions’, American Journal of Sociology, LXXXIV (1978), 99–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Burstein, and Freudenberg, , ‘Ending the Vietnam War: Components of Change in Senate Voting on Vietnam War Bills’, American Journal of Sociology, LXXXII (1977), 991–1006CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The latter two studies do not focus explicitly on the agenda, but, instead, examine large shifts in voting, shifts that result in fundamental changes in public policy.

48 For the effect of ‘succession’ on policy and agenda, see Bunce, Valerie Jane, ‘The Succession Connection: Policy Cycles and Political Change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe’, American Political Science Review, LXXIV (1980), 966–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tufte, Edward R., Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Hibbs, Douglas, ‘Political Parties and Macro-economic Policy’, American Political Science Review, LXXI (1977), 467–87.Google Scholar

49 Pennock, J. Roland, ‘Reponsiveness, Responsibility, and Majority Rule’, American Political Science Review, XLVI (1953), 790–810, p. 791.Google Scholar

50 Adamany, , ‘Legitimacy, Realigning Elections, and the Supreme Court’, passim.Google Scholar

51 Surveys of the American public have consistently shown that support for civil liberties or democratic principles rests on very shaky foundations; see, for instances, Stouffer, Samuel A., Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (New York: Wiley, 1955)Google Scholar; Davis, James A., ‘Communism, Conformity, Cohorts, and Categories: American Tolerance in 1954 and 1972–73’, American Journal of Sociology, LXXXI (1975), 491–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, more recently, Sullivan, John L., Marcus, George E., Feldman, Stanley and Piereson, James E., ‘The Sources of Political Tolerance: A Multivariate Analysis’, American Political Science Review, LXXV (1981), 92–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar