Supreme Court Influence on the Public's Political Agenda

• In Event: Poster Session: Presidents and Executive Politics & Public Policy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Public Policy

Abstract

This paper addresses the question: does the Supreme Court influence public attention to policy issues when it decides cases? In other words, does the Supreme Court increase the political salience of the issues on which it speaks? While few have explicitly addressed this question of Supreme Court agenda-setting effects on the public’s larger political agenda, the leading studies in this area suggest that Court decisions have this effect when they significantly alter the political status quo (Flemming, Bohte, and Wood 1997; Ura 2009). However, this theory of Supreme Court agenda influence rests on shaky foundations: Flemming and colleagues (1997) arrived at this argument inductively and did not directly test it. Since then, Ura (2009) found empirical support for the theory, but only examined four cases in one issue area. As such, the empirical case for this theory is rather thin.
In this paper, I analyze time-series data to test this theory against a large and heterogeneous sample of cases in a wide range of issue domains, in an effort to shed new light on this important question.

Author

• Logan Strother, Purdue University