Scholars of the US House disagree over the importance of political parties in organizing the
legislative process. On the one hand, non-partisan theories stress how congressional …

The congressional agenda, Frances Lee contends, includes many issues about which
liberals and conservatives generally agree. Even over these matters, though, Democratic …

When the US Supreme Court invalidated the use of military commissions for enemy
combatants in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld,'the decision fueled more than a national debate over …

Empirically oriented scholars often struggle with how to measure preferences across time
and institutional contexts. This article characterizes these difficulties and provides a …

When a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court, the president can attempt to use his power of
nomination strategically in order to bring the Court in line with his own policy preferences …

At present much of political science consists of a large body of formal mathematical work that
remains largely unexplored empirically and an expanding use of sophisticated statistical …

The premise of this paper is that while the comparative study of courts can address some
vitally important questions in judicial politics, these gains will not be secured without a valid …

Back in the 1940s the political scientist C. Herman Pritchett began tallying the votes and
opinions of Supreme Court Justices. His goal was to use data to test the hypothesis that the …

The role of the US Supreme Court in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election raised
questions in the minds of many Americans about the relationships between judges and …

One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the
US Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across …