Does Public Opinion Influence the Merits Votes of Supreme Court Justices?

• In Event: Judicial Decision-Making: Public Response and Influence

Brief Overview

Whether SCOTUS responds to public opinion is a key question in American politics, but this literature is fraught with major inferential problems. We move away from past approaches and use a suite of machine learning techniques to answer the question.

Authors

• Benjamin Johnson, Pennsylvania State University

• Logan Strother, Purdue University