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.

Maximising Concreteness

To maximise concreteness, the researchers focused on a specific time and area of study; civil liberties cases between 1953 and 1987. I am not, however, sure that the dependent variable selection is entirely conducive to maximum concreteness. Surely there were more than four newspapers reporting on the Supreme Court decisions of the time. Also, smaller newspapers might have provided valuable and comparable insights into the political views of the justices concerned. In order to obtain as high a level of concreteness as possible, it might therefore have been a better decision to include more data, especially as these data are dependent upon the viewpoints espoused by the specific papers involved rather than upon verifiable sources.