How Political Bias Explains Everything – Tablet Magazine
Simply put, the attitudinal model is the codified idea that political preferences, especially when combined with a few other variables, generally predict how individuals will behave. The concept was first introduced by the political scientists Jeff Segal and Harold Spaeth, in their 1993 book The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model. Segal and Spaeth assert that the notion that decisions by leaders capable of independent action, a category that includes SCOTUS justices, are objective, dispassionate, and impartial [is] obviously belied by the facts. Clearly, different courts and different judges do not decide the same issue the same way, and even decisions from the same court are invariably larded with concurrences, dissenting opinions, and so forth. A key point these authors make is that there will generally be enough respected precedent cases available on all sides in a major legal matter or enough potential variables available in the context of an academic model that anyone intelligent could find no dearth & to support their assertions.
What, then, determines leadership-level decisions? Personal attitudes, albeit somewhat constrained by individual rules and norms. Decisions of the Court are based on the facts of the case in light of the ideologies, attitudes, and values of the Justices, Segal and Spaeth write. The authors test this claim empirically that is why the book is famous and find that the position of individual judicial decision-makers on a standard (-1 to 1) scale measuring personal conservatism/liberalism predicts roughly 80% (.79) of all of their votes. Across a set of prominent death penalty cases, the political-ideology metric that is, a measure of the individual justices ideological leaning compiled from their past voting behavior, newspaper editorials, and off-bench speeches and writings predicted the behavior of every SCOTUS Justice in 19 out of 23 situations.
Analysis: very true. Very, very true. As true as all get out.