Theoretical Importance of Agenda Setting for the Rehnquist Court
Given the recent release of the Blackmun Papers, which, along with other original data sources are being used in the NSF-sponsored agenda setting research of the Burger Court, research into the agenda setting of the Rehnquist Court is now possible. Until this time, agenda setting researchers, which is crucially important to an understanding of why the Court chooses to decide a small unrepresentative handful of cases from the thousands petitioned for its review, have had to select on the dependent variable because of the lack of data about the cases denied certiorari. By the end of 2007, the invalidity of this focus will be surmounted for the Burger Court. But this Court ended a generation ago and researchers lack the data for a comparative focus (to say nothing of currency), which is so valuable from both a theoretical and empirical standpoint. The addition of comparable data for the Rehnquist Court (1987-2005) overcomes this shortcoming. Speculative inferences of unknown certainty and quality about agenda setting will henceforth admit to a sound grounding theoretically and empirically.
