May It Please the President: The Solicitor General's Policymaking Role

• In Event: Judicial Decisions

Abstract

I investigate how much influence the President of the United States can exert over the Supreme Court’s decision making by measuring congruence between the President’s more general policy agenda and the Solicitor General’s more focused policy agenda. Judicial agenda setting studies conclude that the Solicitor General of the United States can and does exhibit influence on the Supreme Court’s decisions from decisions ranging from whether to deny certiorari or which litigants should prevail in a given case. The SG’s unique position as an advisor to the President and the Court reveals much about how policy develops in our separation of powers system. This is both a study of policy attention as well as a close examination of the relationship between the Court and the President. I hypothesize that when the President’s agenda is most congruent with the SG’s agenda, the Court will be more likely to rule in favor of the SG’s position. When the SG’s position and the President’s position are least aligned, the Court is less likely to rule in favor of the SG’s position. This paper provides a necessary step in bridging the gap between the policy literature and the judicial politics literature. I leverage data on Supreme Court decisions coded for policy content according to the Policy Agendas Project as well as coded for legal content with the Supreme Court Database and the Amicus Curiae Database.

Author

• Christine Bird, The University of Texas at Austin