Factors Influence the Magnitude of Ideological Voting on the U.S. Supreme

Most scholarship on Supreme Court decision making assumes that justices’ ideological preferences exhibit a uniform impact on their choices across a variety of situations. I develop a theoretical framework positing the impor-tance of case-level context in shaping the magnitude of ideological voting on the Court. I hypothesize how issue-related factors influence this magnitude. I test the hypotheses using a multilevel modeling framework on data from the 1953-2004 terms. The results provide support for several of the hypotheses; issue salience, issue attention, the authority for the decision (statutory inter-pretation versus constitutionality of federal or state laws), intercourt conflict, the presence of a lower court dissent, and mandatory versus discretionary jurisdiction all significantly influence ideological voting. Overall, the article adds significant qualifications to extant theories of judicial decision making by showing how ideological voting on the Court is shaped by the varying situa-tions that confront the justices from case to case. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016apr.sagepub.comDownloaded fro