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Strategic Versus Sincere Behavior: The Impact of Issue Salience and Congress on the Supreme Court Docket

The theory proposed here is that the Supreme Court behaves in a strategic manner at the agenda-setting stage in order to vote sincerely on the merits. To test this, I measure the impact issue salience and ideological distance between Congress and the Supreme Court has on the agenda. The results indicate that whether the Supreme Court behaves either sincerely or strategically depends on the policy area. The strategic nature of the Supreme Court at the agenda-setting phase may be in large part why some research shows that the Court behaves sincerely when voting on the merits. By behaving strategically at the agenda-setting phase, the Court is free to vote sincerely in later parts of the judicial process.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc3106
Date05 1900
CreatorsWilliams, Jeffrey David
ContributorsFeigert, Frank, Smith, Donald Wiley, Forde, Steven
PublisherUniversity of North Texas
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
FormatText
RightsPublic, Copyright, Williams, Jeffrey David, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.

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