(iPoster) The Impact of Ideology and Scope of Conflict on Administrative Agency Cases

• In Event: Poster Session: Judicial Politics & Public Administration
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Judicial Politics

Abstract

Scholarly consensus exists that when it comes to ideological decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court, not all issues are created equal. Cases involving civil rights and liberties issues are more likely to activate individual justices’ ideology than economic issues, for example. However, this dichotomous approach of categorizing cases may be limiting in testing ideological decision-making, as cases like National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius (2012), an economic case with broad societal implications, undoubtedly involve ideological decision-making on the part of individual Justices. Also unexplored is the impact of federal agencies’ ideological positions. While bureaucratic scholars have done great work in identifying the ideological positions of individual agencies as being separate from the president’s, I find no examples of these measures being applied to Supreme Court decision-making. Crucially, viewing agency ideology as distinct from the president’s by adopting these measures allows for greater understanding of judicial decision-making, as cases where an agency’s ideology is aligned with the Court’s while the president’s ideology is not may be identified.

This article combines two novel approaches to understanding Supreme Court decision-making. First, I expand beyond viewing cases from the civil rights/liberties and economic issues dichotomy by constructing a measure of how large the scope of conflict in a given case is, as I expect that as more groups in society are potentially impacted by a Supreme Court ruling, justices are more likely to vote on ideologically based grounds. Second, I introduce measures for categorizing agency ideology as distinctly separate from the president’s to assess whether individual justices are more likely to defer to federal agencies when they are ideologically aligned with them, and more likely to vote against them when they are ideologically distant, irrespective of the president’s ideology. To test these two assumptions, I examine all federal agency cases from 1954-2020.

Author

• Matthew Cooper, University of Tennessee