This proposal focuses directly on the language included in congressional statutes and is aimed at assessing the extent to which statutory language is used to control the decisions that state and federal judges make.
Intellectual Merit Evaluating the tension between the legislative and judicial branches has been difficult because of a lack of empirical measures across the multiple dimensions of law and politics. While numerous analyses have empirically demonstrated the influence of ideology, a similar body of literature has not emerged for the quantitative analysis of legal influences. Consequently, theoretical development has tended to focus on the ideology of judges and members of Congress to the detriment of legal influences. Although qualitative research reinforces the conventional wisdom about legal influences, "the real question is not whether such behavior exists at all but whether it exists at systematic and substantively meaningful levels" (Spaeth and Segal 1999, 7). Our research project develops an empirical measure of a new legal dimension--statutory constraint--and tests the measure across decisions in state and federal courts. It contributes to broader development of theory by allowing scholars to evaluate relationships among governmental institutions across legal, attitudinal, and institutional dimensions. Additionally, our research offers an alternative approach for examining separation-of-powers relationship between legislatures and judiciaries. We develop this approach by examining how federal and state legislatures attempt to use the language of statutes to control the decision making process of judges. Each, we argue, possesses the ability to constrain judicial behavior by passing statutes containing detailed language. To investigate this thesis we borrow from the bureaucratic politics literature to introduce and test a new measure of statutory constraint. This measure permits a rigorous examination of the relationship between law and politics (i.e., between statutory constraint and ideological preferences). The hypotheses we shall test in this research project build upon our previous research, showing that a Congress successfully controls judicial behavior through statutory language. Here, we attempt to improve our theoretical knowledge by examining the tradeoff between politics and law in judicial decision making.
Broader Impact These initial results have important implications for theories of judicial politics and separation-of-powers and our proposal builds upon these insights. By continuing to develop new empirical measures of legal influence, and subjecting those measures to rigorous tests, we offer a new approach to evaluating existing theories of governmental relations. Consequently, this approach has the potential to make a broader social impact by providing academic researchers, policy analysts, legal practitioners, and individuals interested in governmental relations and democratic theory with new insights into governmental operations. Future research on the legislative process will be able to rely on our measure to determine the impact that legislation has on society; future research on the judicial process will be able to rely on our measure to determine the systematic impact of legal influences on judges; and future research on inter-governmental relations will be able to rely on our measure to evaluate various aspects associated with democratic governance and the constitutional separation-of-powers.
