Bayesian Learning about Ideal Points of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 1953-1999∗

Abstract

At the heart of attitudinal and strategic explanations of judicial behavior is the assumption that justices have policy preferences. These preferences have been measured in a handful of ways, including using factor analysis and multidimensional scaling techniques (Schubert, 1965, 1974), looking at past votes in a single policy area (Epstein et al., 1989), content-analyzing newspaper editorials at the time of appointment to the Court (Segal and Cover, 1989), and recording the background characteristics of the justices (Tate and Handberg, 1991). In this manuscript we employ Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to fit Bayesian measurement models of judicial preferences for all justices serving on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 to 1999. We are particularly interested in considering to what extent ideal points of justices change throughout their tenure on the Court, and how the proposals over which they are voting also change across time. To do so, we fit four longitudinal item response models that include dynamic specifications for the ideal points and the case-specific parameters. Our results suggest that justices do not have constant ideal points, even after controlling for the types of cases that come before the Court. # Prepared for delivery at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco Hilton and Towers, August 30 - September 2, 2001. Copyright by the American Political Science Association. We would like to thank Michael Bailey, Scott Comparato, Lee Epstein, Mark Handcock, Peter Ho#, Rich Pacelle, Keith Poole, Adrian Raftery, Kate Stovel, and Steve Van Winkle for useful discussions along the way. All analyses were performed on Linux workstations using code written by the authors in C++ using the Scythe Statistical Library ...

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