Justice blocks and predictability of US Supreme Court votes

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that predicting US Supreme Court votes using social network analysis methods reveals stable voting blocks and behavioral patterns, outperforming legal experts and content-based algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of social network models to predict judicial votes and analyze the stability of voting blocks over time.

Findings

Supreme Court votes are more predictable than ideal independent models suggest.

Divided 5-4 decisions show more stable voting blocks.

Predictability decreased from the Warren to Rehnquist Court and was lower during Democratic presidencies.

Abstract

Successful attempts to predict judges' votes shed light into how legal decisions are made and, ultimately, into the behavior and evolution of the judiciary. Here, we investigate to what extent it is possible to make predictions of a justice's vote based on the other justices' votes in the same case. For our predictions, we use models and methods that have been developed to uncover hidden associations between actors in complex social networks. We show that these methods are more accurate at predicting justice's votes than forecasts made by legal experts and by algorithms that take into consideration the content of the cases. We argue that, within our framework, high predictability is a quantitative proxy for stable justice (and case) blocks, which probably reflect stable a priori attitudes toward the law. We find that U. S. Supreme Court justice votes are more predictable than one would expect from an ideal court composed of perfectly independent justices. Deviations from ideal behavior are most apparent in divided 5-4 decisions, where justice blocks seem to be most stable. Moreover, we find evidence that justice predictability decreased during the 50-year period spanning from the Warren Court to the Rehnquist Court, and that aggregate court predictability has been significantly lower during Democratic presidencies. More broadly, our results show that it is possible to use methods developed for the analysis of complex social networks to quantitatively investigate historical questions related to political decision-making.