| dc.description.abstract | Throughout history, the United States Supreme Court has served as a major player in shaping
the character and direction of public policy through the decisions it hands down. The issues that
have garnered the Court’s attention have also changed over time, suggesting that the type of cases
that receive certiorari fluctuate according to judicial preferences. Most research on certiorari has
highlighted the importance of this process for understanding judicial decision-making, especially
in regards to which cases are selected for review. But, we know less about the importance of issues
in the agenda-setting process, and why issues, not specific cases, explain agenda-setting. This
project brings together a theoretical framework that focuses on the influence of macro-level considerations
on certiorari with a methodological emphasis on explaining dynamic agenda-setting.
The macro-political theory of agenda setting produces three predictions about the dynamics
of issue attention on the Supreme Court. First, the Supreme Court’s issue attention should shift
toward policy domains over which Republicans exert greater issue ownership as the membership
of the Court becomes more conservative, and, conversely, the Court should pay greater attention to
policy domains over which Democrats have stronger issue ownership as the Court becomes more
liberal. Second, the Court’s issue attention should follow public perceptions of problems in the
political, economic, or social environment, leading the Court to take more cases in issue areas
where the American people identify important public problems. Finally, the Court’s issue agenda
should respond to changes in the political, economic and social environment that produce changes
in the volume of litigation activity in particular policy domains, influencing the composition of the
set of cases from which the Court constructs its docket and, therefore, its issue agenda.
Another contribution of this dissertation is the introduction of compositional dependent variable
models to judicial politics. This methodology examines the trade-off relationships that shape
the Supreme Court’s agenda over time, with the underlying theory that the composition of the
agenda reflects the relative importance of the Court’s partisan priorities. Using this approach, the
data indicate that the partisan composition of the Court alters the policy preferences represented
on the judicial agenda and that there are trade-off relationships that have been largely masked by
exploring the ebb and flow of issue attention across different issue areas separately.
The results indicate that issue attention by the U.S. Supreme Court is not merely the result
of the incidental aggregation of the policy domains in which individual cases are situated. The
Court’s attention to different issues is systematically associated with macro-political dynamics in
the ideological orientations of the Court’s members and the political environment. This mirrors
patterns of aggregate issue attention in the elected branches of national government and highlight
a political economy of judicial issue attention. Further, the data indicate that partisanship and
ideology have differential effects on the types of issues the justices place on their agenda, indicating
that the related concepts need to be considered independently in more research in judicial politics. | en |
