Political influences on Supreme Court justices' voting decisions

¶ … rules was the research conducted by Segal and Cover to determine the extent to which Supreme Court justices were influenced by their own political views when casting votes on important issues. The three theories to apply to this study include:

Building theories that are internally consistent,

Selecting dependent variables carefully, and Maximizing concreteness.

Building theories that are internally consistent

One of the ways to ensure that theories are internally consistent is by means of ensuring their validity. This concerns the closeness of the measure to the underlying phenomenon being studied. Some measures could yield a high degree of reliability, but not of validity, as the idea, process, or concept of representation is not accurately reflected. In the study in by Segal and Cover, there were two levels of measurement. One concerned measuring the justices' votes on the cases decided by the Supreme Court, while the other was concerned with measuring their political attitudes. The first was not problem in terms of validity, as they were publicly available for scrutiny. The second, however, presented several problems in terms of validity. One of the main problems was the challenge of obtaining Supreme justices' political viewpoints via measurements such as interviews and questionnaires. Not all of them would be willing to reveal such information. Many of the justices of interest have also died, making their opinions in accessible to the researchers. There was therefore little possibility of internal consistency, because of the nature and subject of study.

Selecting dependent variables carefully

Dependent variables differ from independent variables in that they are manipulated either by the experimenter or by the situations surrounding them. These need to be selected carefully in order to ensure the reliability and validity of the data obtained. Although the study by Segal and Cover is not experimental, the dependent variables in question relate to the availability of Supreme Court justices. The set of independent variables were therefore the publicly available votes cast by the justices. However, the dependent variables were reliant on the time period selected for the focus of the study as well as the source of variables selected, in the form of newspaper editorials in four major newspaper during the time of focus within the study. These variables are therefore dependent on the specific viewpoint held by the newspapers and their editors at the time, and could affect validity and consistency. Nevertheless, this problem is generally mitigated by the number newspapers and editorials selected.

Maximising Concreteness