for Democratic Action while the American Conservative Union scores are used for
conservative ideology.
The dependent variable is the justice’s vote on the bench from 1992 to 2001. This
data was made available by Wilkins
18
and computes the percentage of times a particular
justice votes on an issue. We use the scores in this paper from 1992 to 2001 allowing us
to control for the current court. All but two of these justices have been presiding together
continuously since the beginning of our data and Breyer and Ginsburg come in very
quickly. By using this time period, we are able to see if the president’s ideology has an
influence on a justice’s voting behavior regardless of his or her colleagues on a court. The
voting percentages were computed on the following issues: a vote for a state claim in a
federalism case; a vote for a challenge to the exercise of federal jurisdiction; a vote for a
statutory civil rights claim; a vote for an equal protection claim; a vote for freedom of
association, expression, or religion (hereafter first amendment); a vote for the federal
government against a private party in a criminal case; a vote for a state government
against a private party in a criminal case; a vote for the federal government against a
private party in a civil case; and a vote for the state government against a private party in
a civil case. As the justices’ votes do not change drastically over the years in this study,
we use a mean score of voting to analyze the relationship between the president’s
ideology and the justice’s vote. There are ten scores for each justice, excepting Breyer
and Ginsburg who do not have data in the first couple of years, on each issue from which
we compute our mean.
18
Wilkins, Richard G. Supreme Court Voting Behavior: 2000 Term, Hastings Constitutional Law
Quarterly, Winter 2002. Professor Wilkins at the J. Reuben Clark Law School has analyzed the voting
behavior of justices since 1998. Earlier versions of his data were published in the BYU Journal of Public
Law. More recently, Wilkins’ annual study has been published in the Hastings Constitutional Law
Quarterly. He kindly made his entire data set available to us for use in this paper.
Convention