Endogenous Jurisprudential Regimes

Jurisprudential regime theory is a legal explanation of decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court that asserts that a key precedent in an area of law fundamentally restructures the relationship between case characteristics and the outcomes of future cases. In this article, we offer a multivariate mu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Political analysis 2012-10, Vol.20 (4), p.417-436
Main Authors: Pang, Xun, Friedman, Barry, Martin, Andrew D., Quinn, Kevin M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Administrative Law
Bayesian analysis
Bayesian networks
Clauses
Decision Making
Establishment clause
Judiciary
Law
Markov Process
Modeling
Monte Carlo simulation
Political analysis
Political Institutions
Regime change
Regime Theory
Speech
Supreme Court decisions
Supreme Court justices
Supreme Courts
Time series
Time series models
Transition probabilities
Voting
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Summary:Jurisprudential regime theory is a legal explanation of decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court that asserts that a key precedent in an area of law fundamentally restructures the relationship between case characteristics and the outcomes of future cases. In this article, we offer a multivariate multiple change-point probit model that can be used to endogenously test for the existence of jurisprudential regimes. Unlike the previously employed methods, our model does so by estimating the locations of many possible change-points along with structural parameters. We estimate the model using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, and use Bayesian model comparison to determine the number of change-points. Our findings are consistent with jurisprudential regimes in the Establishment Clause and administrative law contexts. We find little support for hypothesized regimes in the areas of free speech and search-and-seizure. The Bayesian multivariate change-point model we propose has broad potential applications to studying structural breaks in either regular or irregular time-series data about political institutions or processes.
ISSN:1047-1987
1476-4989
DOI:10.1093/pan/mps024