Hard to Judge
Senator Opposition to Supreme Court Nominations: Reference Dependence on the Departing Justice
L.J. Zigerell
Legislative Studies Quarterly, August 2010, Pages 393-416
Abstract:
Research indicates that senators evaluate U.S. Supreme Court nominations on two ideological dimensions: the distance between themselves and the nominee, and the potential effect confirmation would have on the Court median. My analysis of nominations from 1968 to 2006 provides evidence that senators are also influenced by the ideological contrast between the nominee and the departing justice.
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On the Relationship between Public Opinion and Decision Making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals
Bryan Calvin, Paul Collins & Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors explore whether the federal courts act as countermajoritarian institutions by investigating the influence of public mood on decision making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals from 1961 to 2002. The results indicate that public opinion affects courts of appeals decision making indirectly through judicial replacements and institutional constrains from Congress, but the authors fail to uncover evidence that courts of appeals judges respond directly to changes in public opinion. They conclude that, absent membership turnover in the circuit or in Congress, the courts of appeals are not responsive to the will of the public.
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Todd Collins
Law & Policy, October 2010, Pages 434-453
Abstract:
Building on strategic models and the collegial nature of the U.S. courts of appeals, this article assesses the influence of a circuits' composition on individual judges' behaviors and the president's role in shaping the courts. As partisanship is one of the few signals of a nominee's ideology known to an executive administration at the time of appointment, it is important to measure partisan composition as a factor in individual behavior as well as other measures of overall ideology of the circuit. This article finds that the composition of the circuits influences individual behavior, even after controlling for individual ideology, panel effects, and other contextual factors. This remains true whether we examine composition based on partisanship or on more nuanced ideological measures. Noting that presidents, on average, create new partisan majorities within two circuits per four-year term, these findings suggest turnover on circuit courts may have influences on case outcomes outside of a particular new appointee's voting record.
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Politics, Careerism, and the Voluntary Departures of U.S. District Court Judges
Thomas Hansford, Elisha Carol Savchak & Donald Songer
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior studies hypothesize that judges time their retirements to allow a likeminded president to select their replacements. We propose a modification to this argument and theorize that during the earlier part of a district court judge's career, it is the likelihood of elevation to an appeals court and other career-oriented concerns that affect whether the judge resigns or stays on the bench. It is during the latter stage of a judge's career when the desire to be replaced with a like-minded judge affects the retirement decision. Our analysis reveals that judges who are not yet pension eligible are influenced by being passed over for appeals court nominations as well as financial incentives to leave for private practice. Only judges who have attained pension eligibility appear to consider their ideological compatibility with the president when deciding to call it quits.
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"Still Chastened": Assessing the Scope of Constitutional Change under an "Obama Court"
Robert Robinson
The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, July 2010
Abstract:
For the first time since 1968, the election of Barack Obama raises the possibility of a liberal majority on the Supreme Court. In this article, I assess whether such an "Obama Court" would lead to significant constitutional change. Drawing on research regarding both the internal dynamics of the Supreme Court and the effect of the Court's external environment, I develop four benchmarks that historically correlate with more rapid and significant constitutional change. Taking each benchmark in turn, I argue that an Obama Court would lack the vision, the desire, and the power to fundamentally reshape the constitutional status quo. Instead, an Obama Court would likely be a mirror image of the later Rehnquist years, drifting to the left on the resolution of some constitutional problems, but in essence remaining a "chastened" institution mainly limited to incremental doctrinal change.
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Do you get what you pay for? Type of counsel and its effect on criminal court outcomes
Richard Hartley, Holly Ventura Miller & Cassia Spohn
Journal of Criminal Justice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the Sixth Amendment of the constitution guarantees assistance of counsel to indigent criminal defendants, questions exist about the quality of this representation. Critics assert that 'you get what you pay for' and that public defenders are less effective than privately retained counsel regarding criminal justice outcomes. Some research, however, reveals that public defenders are as effective as privately retained counsel because of their working relationships with prosecutors and judges, the so-called courtroom workgroup. The current study tested the assertion that 'you get what you pay for' by examining the effect of type of counsel (public defenders versus private attorneys) on four different case processing outcomes for a large mid-western jurisdiction. Results generally show that type of counsel has no significant direct effect. Tests for interaction, however, suggest that for some defendants, type of counsel interacts with other key variables to influence certain outcomes.
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Brandon Bartels
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
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 importance 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 interpretation 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 situations that confront the justices from case to case.
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The Effects of Judicial Campaign Activity on the Legitimacy of Courts: A Survey-Based Experiment
James Gibson, Jeffrey Gottfried, Michael Delli Carpini & Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The purpose of this article is to investigate the consequences of judicial campaign activity for the perceived legitimacy of the Pennsylvania judiciary. The authors find that politicized campaign ads do detract from court support, although they find practically no difference between traditional campaign ads (e.g., presenting endorsements from groups) and strong attack ads. But this finding must be understood within the context of the 2007 Pennsylvania election increasing court support for all respondents, even those exposed to the most politicized ad content. Being exposed to politicized ads seems to retard the benefits of elections but does not eliminate them.
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Enough skill to kill: Intentionality judgments and the moral valence of action
Steve Guglielmo & Bertram Malle
Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action's intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people's intentionality judgments. His and other researchers' studies suggested that blameworthy actions are considered intentional even when the agent lacks skill (e.g., killing somebody with a lucky shot) whereas equivalent neutral actions are not (e.g., luckily hitting a bull's-eye). The present five studies offer an alternative account of these provocative findings. We suggest that people see the morally significant action examined in previous studies (killing) as accomplished by a basic action (pressing the trigger) for which an unskilled agent still has sufficient skill. Studies 1 through 3 show that when this basic action is performed unskillfully or is absent, people are far less likely to view the killing as intentional, demonstrating that intentionality judgments, even about immoral actions, are guided by skill information. Studies 4 and 5 further show that a neutral action such as hitting the bull's-eye is more difficult than killing and that difficult actions are less often judged intentional. When difficulty is held constant, people's intentionality judgments are fully responsive to skill information regardless of moral valence. The present studies thus speak against the hypothesis of a moral evaluation bias in intentionality judgments and instead document people's sensitivity to subtle features of human action.
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Compensatory cognition associated with egalitarian goals
Gordon Moskowitz, Peizhong Li, Courtney Ignarri & Jeff Stone
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two experiments examine nonconscious processes that facilitate pursuing egalitarian goals. It was hypothesized that when working on a task not known to be relevant to egalitarian goals there is heightened ability to detect opportunities to goal pursuit (goal-relevant people) embedded in the task, even when they are best ignored for optimal performance. Further, this selective attention should cease when the goal is sated, despite increased semantic accessibility of these opportunities that results from satiation. Experiment one introduced egalitarian goals via writing an essay about failing to be egalitarian to Black men. Next, an ostensibly unrelated task presented Black and White men in an array of faces as distracters to a focal task. Task performance was disrupted only by arrays containing Black men, and only among participants primed with egalitarian goals. This was not due to increased semantic accessibility of the concept "Black men." Experiment two had all participants write failure essays and then write second essays. Half wrote affirming essays about egalitarianism and Black men. Despite this increased semantic accessibility of the group "Black men," distracted attention was not evidenced. Instead, the goal had been satisfied and goal pursuit shut down. In contrast, the remaining participants wrote affirming essays in an irrelevant domain. Despite the decreased semantic accessibility, goal accessibility remained and was evidenced by selective attention to Black men. These findings reveal Black men are associated not with stereotypes, but egalitarian goals. They also point to the role goal completion versus self affirmation play in goal pursuit.
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Stephen Porter, Leanne ten Brinke & Chantal Gustaw
Psychology, Crime & Law, July 2010, Pages 477-491
Abstract:
There is little support for the long-standing assumption that judges and jurors can accurately assess credibility. According to Dangerous Decisions Theory (DDT; Porter & ten Brinke, Legal and Criminological Psychology, 14, 119-134, 2009), intuitive evaluations of trustworthiness based on the face may strongly bias the interpretation of subsequent information about a target. In a courtroom setting, the assessment of evidence provided by or concerning a defendant may be fundamentally flawed if its interpretation is influenced by an initial, spontaneous assessment of trustworthiness. In an empirical test of DDT, participants were presented with two vignettes describing major or minor crimes, accompanied by a photograph of the supposed defendant, previously rated as highly trustworthy or untrustworthy in appearance. Participants evaluated culpability following the presentation of evidence in each case. Participants required less evidence to arrive at a guilty verdict and were more confident in this decision for untrustworthy-appearing defendants. The current evidence supports DDT and has implications for legal decision-making practices.
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Investigating the Neural and Cognitive Basis of Moral Luck: It's Not What You Do but What You Know
Liane Young, Shaun Nichols & Rebecca Saxe
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, September 2010, Pages 333-349
Abstract:
Moral judgments, we expect, ought not to depend on luck. A person should be blamed only for actions and outcomes that were under the person's control. Yet often, moral judgments appear to be influenced by luck. A father who leaves his child by the bath, after telling his child to stay put and believing that he will stay put, is judged to be morally blameworthy if the child drowns (an unlucky outcome), but not if his child stays put and doesn't drown. Previous theories of moral luck suggest that this asymmetry reflects primarily the influence of unlucky outcomes on moral judgments. In the current study, we use behavioral methods and fMRI to test an alternative: these moral judgments largely reflect participants' judgments of the agent's beliefs. In "moral luck" scenarios, the unlucky agent also holds a false belief. Here, we show that moral luck depends more on false beliefs than bad outcomes. We also show that participants with false beliefs are judged as having less justified beliefs and are therefore judged as more morally blameworthy. The current study lends support to a rationalist account of moral luck: moral luck asymmetries are driven not by outcome bias primarily, but by mental state assessments we endorse as morally relevant, i.e. whether agents are justified in thinking that they won't cause harm.
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A group construal account of drop-in-the-bucket thinking in policy preference and moral judgment
Daniel Bartels & Russell Burnett
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Decisions, both moral and mundane, about saving individuals or resources at risk are often influenced not only by numbers saved and lost but also by proportions of groups saved and lost. Consider choosing between a program that saves 60 of 240 lives at risk and one that saves 50 of 100. The first option maximizes absolute number saved; the second, proportion saved. In two studies, we show that the influence of proportions on such decisions depends on how items at risk are mentally represented. In particular, we show that proportions have greater influence on people's decisions to the extent that the items at risk are construed as forming groups, as opposed to distinct individuals. Construal was manipulated by means of animated displays in which resources at risk moved either independently (promoting individual construal) or jointly (promoting group construal). Results support the hypothesis that (a) decision makers form mental representations which vary in the degree to which resources at risk are construed as groups versus individuals and (b) construal of resources as groups promotes the influence of proportions on decisions and moral judgments.
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Seeing it their way: Evidence for rapid and involuntary computation of what other people see
Dana Samson, Ian Apperly, Jason Braithwaite, Benjamin Andrews & Sarah Bodley Scott
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a series of three visual perspective-taking experiments, we asked adult participants to judge their own or someone else's visual perspective in situations where both perspectives were either the same or different. We found that participants could not easily ignore what someone else saw when making self-perspective judgments. This was observed even when participants were only required to take their own perspective within the same block of trials (Experiment 2) or even within the entire experiment (Experiment 3), i.e. under conditions which gave participants a clear opportunity to adopt a strategy of ignoring the other person's irrelevant perspective. Under some circumstances, participants were also more efficient at judging the other person's perspective than at judging their own perspective. Collectively, these results suggest that adults make use of rapid and efficient processes to compute what other people can see.