An Expert-Sourced Measure of Judicial Ideology

This article develops the first dynamic method for systematically estimating the ideologies and other traits of nearly the entire federal judiciary. The Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores (JuDJIS) method derives from computational text analysis of over 20,000 written evaluations by a representative sample of tens of thousands of jurists as part of an ongoing, systematic survey initiative begun in 1985. The resulting data constitute not only the first such comprehensive federal-court measure that is dynamic, but also the only such measure that is based on judging, and the only such measure that is potentially multi-dimensional. The results of empirical validity tests reflect these advantages. Validation on a set of several-thousand appellatedecisionsindicatesthattheideologyestimatespredictoutcomessignificantlymoreaccuratelythantheexistingappellatemeasures,suchastheJudicialCommonSpace.Inadditiontoinformingtheoretical debatesaboutthenatureofjudicialideologyanddecision-making,theJuDJISinitiativemightleadcourts scholarstorevisitsomeofthelower-courtresearchfindingsofthelasttwodecades,whicharegenerally based on static, non-judicial models. Perhaps most importantly, this method could foster breakthroughs in courts research that, until now, were impossible due to data limitations.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  Social Science Research Network

• Publication date

  Unknown publication date

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.2139/ssrn.4742254
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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