The Ideological Foundations of the Modern U.S. Supreme Court

• In Event: Understanding the Courts in a Post-Dobbs Era

Abstract

The U.S. Supreme Court hands down decisions that have extremely important consequences for salient issues, whether about elections or about issues such as abortion (like Dobbs). While this narrative of the Court being highly ideological does accurately characterize a significant portion of the Court’s formally argued decisions, scholars have historically devoted relatively little attention to exploring the degree to which ideological proclivities of the Court manifest in other dimensions of the Courts’, and individual justices’, behavior.

We examine the policy impact of the universe of all petitions granted certiorari during the Roberts Court from 2005-2022, with the goal to compare the ideological output of the Roberts Court with that of the Rehnquist Court, to see how similar they have (or have not) behaved to one another. Given that the current Roberts Court has become more conservative in recent years, one may intuitively expect the Court to strongly advance ideologically conservative preferences across both its agenda-setting and decision-making processes.

Our preliminary results provide support against these expectations. These results have several key findings: first, we find evidence that the Court does not disproportionately review and reverse ideologically distance lower court decisions. Second, each coalition (liberal and conservative) tend to behave in rather heterogeneous ways, despite having some important commonalities across the coalition. Third, most shadow docket decisions-in a highly conservative Court-support liberal outcomes rather than conservative ones. Fourth, the cumulative impact of ideological in the Roberts Court is significantly less conservative than many contemporary accounts suggest. Broadly speaking, this project has important implications for the Supreme Court agenda-setting literature, justice decision-making literature, and policy impacts of the Court in the United States political system.

Authors

• Benjamin Kassow, University of North Dakota

• Ali Shiraz Masood, Oberlin College

• Natalie L. Smith, University of Wisconsin-Madison