Agenda-setting in State Courts of Last Resort PDF Download

Author: Benjamin Soltoff
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Languages : en
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Book Description
The attention given to a specific issue area by a political institution drives the types of policies adopted by the institution. For this reason, scholars study agenda-setting and its impacts within institutions to shape issue attention. Yet much of the research on judicial agenda-setting has focused on individual behavior within the confines of the U.S. Supreme Court. This excludes the possibility of accounting for how institutional structure shapes a court's agenda as the Court's formal procedures have not changed significantly in the past 80 years. This previous research suggests that institutions themselves do not have an effect on a court's issue agenda or the types of cases it hears. On the other hand institutional differences might interact with the individual motivations of judges and litigants to influence the composition of a court's docket, but scholars have not identified these effects due to the continued focus on the U.S. Supreme Court.In this project, I develop a theory of institutional judicial agenda-setting which accounts for the motivations of justices, litigants, and interest groups, the parties which have the most influence on a court's agenda, and how institutional rules effect agenda-setting at both the macro- (e.g. a court's overall policy agenda) and micro- (e.g. whether or not an individual case is heard) levels. More specifically, the project leverages cross-state variation in state courts of last resort (COLRs) to empirically test hypotheses about how two broad aspects of COLRs -- jurisdictional rules/procedures and processes for selection and retention of justices -- interact to shape the courts' agendas. In doing so, I develop a generalized model of agenda-setting applicable to any court of last resort. I apply this framework and use new data sources to evaluate how state COLRs shape their agendas. I find that that macro-policy attention is not easily explained by institutional and strategic factors; that judges engage in sincere, not sophisticated, agenda-setting; and that campaign contributions to a state COLR justice from parties involved in litigation increases judicial access.This project offers an integrated, generalized theory of how both justices and litigants shape the judicial agenda, and is the first broad, systematic examination of agenda-setting in state courts of last resort. In the former case, the research identifies to what degree ideological and retention concerns factor into the policy attention of courts and justices' decisions to hear appellate cases, while assessing how litigants balance their desire for judicial victory with their resources and knowledge about the probability of success when facing a hostile court. In the latter case, the research examines the processes of important appellate courts and seeks to resolve the dispute over whether or not these courts are important policymaking institutions. Understanding how justices and litigants influence the agenda-setting process has implications for the strategies of these groups when deciding whether or not to appeal cases or voting to grant or deny appellate review.