Measuring Judicial Policy Preferences Using Case Facts

• In Event: New Measures in Judicial Politics

Abstract

While several methods exist for estimating judges' ideology, the literature lacks a method to estimate judges' preferred rules; i.e., their preferred mappings from case facts to outcomes. I introduce a structural estimation model for preferred rules in case space models of judicial decision making and outline the benefits of this approach over traditional measures of judicial ideology. I then show the relationship between theoretical case space models and empirical models that use case facts as explanatory or control variables. I show such empirical analyses may often be misspecified, and how this model can be used to correct such misspecification.

Author

• JBrandon Duck-Mayr, Washington University in St. Louis