This dissertation develops and empirically tests a theory of interaction between
the federal appellate courts and the bureaucracy with regard to bureaucratic prosecution.
Modeling the bureaucracy as a forward-looking and risk-averse institution and assuming
that there is no uncertainty at the district court level, I posit that institutional uncertainty
created by appellate courts' random assignment of judges and cases affects the
likelihood of bureaucratic prosecution. Given that the decision from a specific panel of a
circuit court can be estimated by its median judge's policy position and that the
bureaucracy does not know which panel will hear the case, there exists institutional
uncertainty at the appellate court level in terms of ideological differences among panels
represented by their median judges. I contend that increasing ideological heterogeneity
within an appellate court measured by its ideological variance among judges increases
institutional uncertainty with respect to the bureaucracy's policy position, which in turn
discourages bureaucratic prosecution. My examination of the Antitrust Division's
prosecution record from 1950 to 1994 demonstrates that ideological variance within the federal circuit courts has a significant impact on the likelihood of prosecution by the
agency. The Antitrust Division is less likely to prosecute when facing a circuit court with
large ideological variance among judges. Studies of judicial decision-making and
judicial control of the bureaucracy have not fully examined the implication of appellate
courts' institutional practice of randomly assigning judges and cases. The development
of ideological variance among circuit judges, in this project, as a measure of the
institutional uncertainty created by the random assignment process suggests that the
courts' unique institutional practice can now be fully incorporated into future studies of
the interaction between the judiciary and the bureaucracy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1025 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Li, Quan |
| Contributors | Flemming, Roy B |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds