Talk:Ideological leanings of United States Supreme Court justices/Archive 1

This is an archive of past discussions about Ideological leanings of United States Supreme Court justices. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

liberal, conservative

It should be noted that being liberal/conservative in the 50-ies was very different than now. Conservative members of Supreme Court today have much more liberal views on gay rights than liberal members of SC 60 years ago. Or 30 years ago. Or 20 years ago. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.0.231.235 (talk) 15:14, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

The current Supreme Court justices also have different views on economic and legal rights than the justices of the 1950s. In addition, they have different views on business, labor, foreign policy, warfare, education, the role of women in society, the role of immigrants in society, how to interact with the environment, and privacy. Some of these opinions are more liberal and some are more conservative than 50 years ago. Their opinions often reflect the culture and technology of the times rather than some strict interpretation of the law that is independent from society. The authors of the academic papers cited on this page have made many assumptions in capturing the extremely complex viewpoints of the Supreme Court justices in their simple binary votes on a handful of cases each year, and they have made even more assumptions in further reducing these votes to a simple conservative/liberal line. But as their papers explain, these academic researchers can actually tease out some useful information (as shown in the graphs) by using complex mathematics. As I understand it, their analyses take into account changes in culture and technology over time. Randy Schutt (talk) 20:32, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

charts are unbalanced

The charts should be ±7 and ±2, not different scales for different directions. — Omegatron (talk) 02:15, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Please read the explanation in the section just above this.

It is not clear why the scales should extend to ±7 and ±2 unless someone can explain what being a "-7" on the Martin-Quinn scale actually means. Is Justice Thomas (with a Martin-Quinn score of 5.566 in 2013) 5.5 times more conservative than Justice Kagen (score 0.981)?

The whole point of the graphs is to show a comparison of the justices to each other and over time, not their absolute "liberalness" or "conservativeness" (whatever that might mean). As best I can tell, in this comparison, the scale and zero-point are arbitrary so I graphed it accordingly. — Randy Schutt (talk) 16:11, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Why Did the Graph Change?

In the first graph, the court is becoming more liberal, but the previous version of the graph shows the court becoming more conservative. Why? KinkyLipids (talk) 05:47, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Career "liberal" voting percentage needs more clear labels

The career "liberal" voting percentage needs more clear labels. Just simply a "higher number means ________" on each bullet. Because "he's more liberal on federalism" or "she's more liberal on taxes" can mean a lot of things. I know there's an attempt at explaining those already, we just need to clean it up. I'll make some changes now and hopefully people will discuss here with any disagreements they have. --Mrcolj (talk) 22:02, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Updating

Could you please update the line graphs in the first section to now? The graphs are kind of outdated and doesn't include Neil Gorsuch. Could you please update the line graphs? Please. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:401:C400:357:D82A:AE38:81F5:F98B (talk) 15:52, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Last I checked, the authors of the source data had not posted the values for 2016-17 on their website: http://mqscores.lsa.umich.edu/measures.php But now they have so I'll update now. Randy Schutt (talk) 20:14, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Hello Randy. I hope that you are well. Were you able to obtain data to update the Bailey chart? Thanks for doing this! SteveOak (talk) 18:34, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Michael Bailey hasn't updated his data. I used the last (and only) dataset https://michaelbailey.georgetown.domains/data/ he has prepared. It covers calendar year 1950 to 2011. Randy Schutt (talk) 18:15, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Fix the table

Could you please fix the table in the 3rd section of the page? It ends in 2017, but it includes Brett Kavanaugh. Could you please fix the table? Please.

Done zchrykng (talk) 21:57, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

You folks are jumping the gun by about 10 months here. The 2018-19 term has just begun. There is no data from this term and won't be until next September or so. The title of this section refers to the beginning of the term as seems to be the common way to denote this. Kavanaugh should not be listed since he was not a justice in the last term the data covers (2017-18). Randy Schutt (talk) 19:01, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

Good point, changed it back and commented out Kavanaugh for now. zchrykng (talk) 01:12, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

Update Table

Now could you update the table? This term is finished. I want Brett Kavanaugh on it? Could you please update the table? Please. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:401:C400:357:B551:7672:152E:14BC (talk) 23:54, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

I couldn't wait much longer. Could you update the table in the 3rd section of the page? Please. We need to add Brett.

The data for the table called "Career "liberal" voting percentage by issue area" is no longer included in the public database. http://epstein.wustl.edu/research/justicesdata.html So there is no way to update the table using this public data. The variables used in November 2017 that are no longer available are: percrim, percr, perfir, perunn, perecon, perfed, perftax. In the November 2017 Excel spreadsheet version of the database, they were in columns IH, IJ, IL, IN, IP, IR, and IT. Randy Schutt (talk) 02:57, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Bailey Graph

How and when does the Bailey graph get updated. I want to know. Please. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:401:C401:9850:D45E:8009:7CDD:2D5 (talk) 00:03, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

This is a question for the person who generated the data: Michael A. Bailey. Here is his website: https://michaelbailey.georgetown.domains Randy Schutt (talk) 19:59, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

Dispute

This article leans too heavily on one author's graph. That author defines "liberal" and "conservative" when it is just opinion.

This article is too much of an op ed, not an encyclopedic article. Many of the considerations are not widely supported but just has one research study.

It is different if the Supreme Court justice states "I am a liberal". Even if that were to happen, then it would only be a case of purported liberal as there is no card carrying membership to back this claim up.

A. What if a person is pro-gun and pro-abortion. Are they liberal or conservative? Or someone is pro-affirmative action, pro-tax cuts?

B. When Roberts said Obamacare is legal because it is a tax, is that liberal or conservative? See, all opinion.

C. How about LGBTQIA rights? Now that is centralist, slightly liberal but before it was criminal. Is segregation liberal or conservative? In the 1950's, it was the Democratic Party, mainly Southern Democrats, that strongly supported it. So segregation is liberal? If so, why is affirmative action liberal? See, definitions change according to opinion shifts.

What is disputed is that it will take huge re-writing to bring this up to an encyclopedic article and not an opinion piece (even if you agree with the opinion). Does World Book or Encyclopedic Britannica have this article? No. Because it is sketchy, even if possibly true. Carunitfiat903 (talk) 17:35, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

If you take a look at the references, you'll see that this page summarizes the work of several dozen serious academic researchers (mostly political scientists) conducted over several decades and mostly published in peer-reviewed academic journals. It is not the work of one person. The concerns you raise (about how to characterize and code complex judicial decisions, whether a single dimension can capture complex opinions, and whether personal ideology guides the decisions of Supreme Court justices) are all directly addressed in this literature and are summarized in this Wikipedia article (see especially the first two paragraphs in the "Ideological leanings over time" section and the references listed in footnotes 3 through 14).

Social science data is inherently "messy" (complex, difficult to measure, and often seemingly inconsistent) but by collecting a large amount of data, defining categories precisely, making reasonable assumptions, and conducting careful analysis, it is possible to codify the data, analyze it, and make predictions that turn out to be accurate more than 80% of the time. This kind of work is not just "opinion". Randy Schutt (talk) 11:56, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Update Bailey Graph

On this website I found, the graph by Michael A. Bailey has been updated. Can someone use it on the main page? Please.

Website I Found: [[1]] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:6C48:427F:F84E:18B5:FAF:8B6B:867 (talk) 18:29, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

The new Bailey article is based on updated data, and refers the reader to Bailey's Georgetown University website https://michaelbailey.georgetown.domains for the results, but the data does not actually appear to be there. The article is listed as a Work in Progress, so perhaps the data will appear when the article is published. Randy Schutt (talk) 20:14, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

misleading graphs

The graphs are not misleading in the sense that they are the result of an objective quantitative process that is blind as to ideology, the item response theory by means of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. They are misleading in several substantive ways. For example, to the extent that the Supreme Court's choosing of the disputes that they decide means that over time very different types of disputes are used as input to determine ideological leanings. More significantly, the algorithm is forced to see difference only in one dimension, which the researchers call liberal-to-conservative. Legal reasoning is a vastly multidimensional system and reducing it to a single dimension hides tons of information. Maybe it also reveals some information but, after years of working in the area, I am still trying to ascertain exactly how to interpret these. The graphs do contain some information, however, uninterpretable as it may be, and should not be deleted. Ngeorgak (talk) 20:11, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Both of these are misleading graphs in that they are skewed toward the liberal side, this making the court appear more conservative than it is. If the liberal goes down to -7, the conservative should go up to 7. If the liberal goes down to -2.5, the conservative goes up to 2.5. I understand that this would essentially be whitespace since no justice is that "conservative" according to the data, but that whitespace conveys useful information.

By placing the centerline of the political axis left of center, these graphs necessitate a close reading to understand that the courts are not as overwhelmingly conservative as they first appear. For the record I am a lifelong Democratic partisan and I believe the court IS skewed toward the conservative ideology...just not as much as is portrayed by these graphics. 75.130.132.103 (talk) 01:21, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

As the text of the article says about the first graph, "Note that the scale and zero point are arbitrary – only the relative distance of the lines is important." I could have left the numbers completely off the left-hand scale, but since the authors use numbers, this seemed like it would be a mistake and would make the graphs even more difficult to understand and interpret. Instead, I specifically noted that these numbers don't mean much. In the second graph, the numbers do mean something since they are meant to be consistent with the DW-Nominate scores calculated for members of Congress, presidents, etc. But the connection to Congress/President is not strong, so even that is a stretch.

Of course, it is entirely unclear what the whole concept of the zero point means on a conservative-liberal scale. Is someone who has a zero value neither liberal nor conservative? What does that mean — they have no values? Or does it just mean they are more liberal than conservatives and more conservative than liberals — that is, the scale is rather arbitrary. Another way to look at this is that over the past 80 years, the members of the Supreme Court have ranged from –7 to 6 on a liberal-conservative scale. So a "moderate" justice might be considered as someone who is halfway between these extremes, i.e., –0.5. Or one could eyeball the graph and say that most of the justices have concentrated around 0.5 so that must be what a "moderate" justice looks like. Either assessment is valid, but neither is the "correct" view. The correct way to view this graph, as I tried to convey in the text: a visual indicator of the relative ideological bent of the justices over time.

By the way, the first graph does indicate that none of the current justices is now voting in as liberal a way as "liberal" Republican Earl Warren did in his whole Supreme Court career or even "moderate" Republican Sandra Day O'Connor did at the end of her stint. So that is a pretty good indicator that the courts now are, actually, pretty overwhelmingly conservative. But there are many other ways to interpret the graphs too (and the individual votes of the justices behind the values), especially depending on your definition of liberal and conservative. And in any interpretation of this analysis, one must take note of the many assumptions behind the values and their large uncertainty, as well as the difficulty in comparing justices of different eras. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Randy Schutt (talk • contribs) 19:29, 11 October 2014 (UTC)