Reginald Sheehan - US grants

The objective of the project is to encourage the expansion of systematic comparative analyses of courts, judges and their behavior based on replicable data. This project will eventuate in a multi-country data base that will (1) focus on the top courts from a manageable most different systems sample of nations, (2) select annual samples of their formal or reported decisions over a half century, (3) code the manifest content of the opinions accompanying the sampled decisions according to a master codebook, measure a set of common variables that are relevant to various analytical interests and that can be equivalently measured across all included nations, and (4) supplement the common variables by coding a set of system-specific variables that might not be measured across all nations.

These data will be created and archived for public use. However, the P.I.s also will use them to analyze an important set of initial research questions, including (1) do these and other courts regularly decide cases with apparently important policy consequences, or do most of them spend most of their time resolving legal disputes of only narrow policy significance?, (2) Do "the haves in fact always come out ahead"? (3) Do judicial independence, functional performance, and support of incumbent regimes by national courts vary with political transitions, proclaimed national crises or with executive appointments of sympathetic judges?

The four collaborating principal investigators in this project (Stacia L. Haynie, Reginald S. Sheehan, Donald R. Songer, and C. Neal Tate) will continue and expand their efforts to develop for public use a systematic, replicable database to support comparative analyses of courts, judges, and their behavior. To further this objective, the principal investigators will extend and expand the multi-country database they are creating with support from National Science Foundation awards (9975180, 9975237, 9975315, 9975323). That database supports descriptive and theoretical research by the whole scholarly community concerned with courts and judges and their functions and behaviors across a number of national/cultural boundaries. It also allows the principal investigators to pursue an initial research agenda highlighting substantive areas that can be fruitfully studied across many nations and many times. The development of this database rests on a central proposition: Theory and data are intimately related. As new data become available, new theories and hypotheses are created and tested. For the overwhelming majority of the world's courts, social scientists lack even the most basic descriptive data summarizing their institutional characteristics, historical development, functional processes, or institutional and individual behaviors. With little more than such simple, descriptive data, scholars might be able to answer any number of theoretically interesting questions. The database that has been compiled under the previous awards show how even a simple analysis of those data provides impressive answers to questions, such as "What Do Supreme Courts Do?" and how general is "Party Capability Theory?" The initial project contains a sample of 100 reported supreme court decisions (or the universe, whichever is smaller) per year for 15 years for a sample eight nations with Anglo-American legal systems. The principal investigators will extend the temporal coverage of the database to include the 34 most recent years of available data and to expand the national and cultural coverage of the database by adding an important civil law, non-English-using court, the Suprema Corte de la Justicia de la Nacion of Mexico.

Sequential voting among collegial courts during deliberations is a phenomenon that is fairly consistent among different types of court systems. However, the method of sequential voting varies widely from court to court. The U.S. Supreme Court uses a seniority sequential voting system during the certiorari vote and the original votes of merits, in which the most senior justice votes first, and so on to the least senior member. U. S. state courts use a multitude of sequential voting mechanisms which range from the seniority system described above, to a reverse seniority system (in which the least tenured justice votes first and so on to the most tenured justice voting last), to a rotation or random seniority system (in which the order of voting is determined randomly). Sequential voting processes affect the level of uncertainty judges confront when they cast their vote on a case. The amount of uncertainty that judges confront when they cast their vote is relevant because this influences a judge's ability to vote strategically. Specifically, it may influence a judge's decision to join the majority coalition. Being in the majority has two benefits for judges: an individual-level benefit and a collective benefit. Individually, in certain judicial systems, a judge who is in the majority has he opportunity to draft the initial opinion where bargaining occurs. Collectively, the formation of supermajorities is attractive since the legitimacy of the court's judgment is heightened when there is consensus about a legal issue. To test the effect of voting sequence, the researchers propose a series of laboratory experiments. Laboratory experiments also allow control for relevant parameters, such as the type of voting system, risk aversion of the judges, size of the court, the level of uncertainty, and the saliency of the issue under consideration. This research will provide evidence about which judge is more likely to vote strategically given his or her position in the voting queue, and the rate of strategic voting that should occur in each of the court systems. The experiments should also provide some useful results about the social welfare properties of each system.