Deriving Interest Group Ideology from Participation on Amicus Curiae Briefs

Authors

  • Richard A. Almeida

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2374-7781.2011.32.0.259-278

Abstract

Many interest groups are known to be ideological actors. Some interest groups self-identify as liberal, progressive, or conservative, while others arguably possess ideologies which can be inferred from their policy platforms, rhetoric, or allies. To date, few attempts have been made to identify and quantify interest group ideology. This paper attempts to demonstrate interest group ideology by recovering one- and two-dimensional ideological mappings from group participation as amici curiae in cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court from 1999-2003. The results demonstrate that groups patterns of cooperation and disagreement across cases and years generate a valid and reliable ideological mapping and provides some initial evidence of ideological structuring of lobbying coalitions in amicus briefs.

References

Baumgartner, Frank R., and Beth L. Leech. 1998. Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781400822485

Berry, Jeffrey M. 1997. The Interest Group Society, 3rd ed. New York: Longman.

Borg, Ingwer, and Patrick Groenen. 1997. Modern Multidimensional Scaling: Theory and Applications. New York: Springer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-2711-1

Caldeira, Gregory A., and John R. Wright. 1988. Organized Interests and Agenda Setting in the U.S. Supreme Court. American Political Science Review 82:1109-1127. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1961752

Caldeira, Gregory A., and John R. Wright. 1990. Amici Curiae Before the Supreme Court: Who Participates, When, and How Much? The Journal of Politics 52:782-806. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2131827

Carpenter, Daniel P., Kevin M. Esterling, and David M.J. Lazer. 2004. Friends, Brokers, and Transitivity: Who Informs Whom in Washington Politics? Journal of Politics 66:224-246. http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1468-2508.2004.00149.x

Carroll, J. Douglas, and Phipps Arabie. 1980. Multidimensional Scaling. Annual Review of Psychology 31:607-649. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.31.020180.003135

Cox, Trevor F., and Michael A.A. Cox. 2001. Multidimensional Scaling, 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall.

Daniel, Wayne W. 1990. Applied Nonparametric Statistics. Boston: PWS-Kent.

Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper & Row.

Endersby, James W., and Sungdai Cho. 2003. Issues, Spatial Models of Voting, and British General Elections: A Comparison of Proximity and Directional Models. Public Choice 114:275-293. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1022616323373

Endersby, James W., and Steven E. Galatas. 1998. British Parties and Spatial Competition: Dimensions of Party Evaluation in the 1992 Election. Public Choice 97:363-382. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1005054311082

Enelow, James M., and Melvin J. Hinich. 1984. The Spatial Theory of Voting: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Epstein, Lee, and C.K. Rowland. 1991. Debunking the Myth of Interest Group Invincibility in the Courts. American Political Science Review 33:825-841. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2111111

Groseclose, Tim, and Jeff Milyo. 2005. A Measure of Media Bias. Quarterly Journal of Economics 120:1191-1237. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/003355305775097542

Hansford, Thomas G. 2004. Information Provision, Organizational Constraints, and the Decision to Submit an Amicus Curiae Brief in a U.S. Supreme Court Case. Political Research Quarterly 57:219-230. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3219866 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/106591290405700204

Hinich, Melvin J., and Michael C. Munger. 1994. Ideology and the Theory of Political Choice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.13147

Hojnacki, Marie, and David C. Kimball. 1998. Organized Interests and the Decision of Whom to Lobby in Congress. American Political Science Review 92:775-790. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2586303

Holyoke, Thomas T. 2003. Choosing Battlegrounds: Interest Group Lobbying Across Multiple Venues. Political Research Quarterly 56:325-336. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3219792 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/106591290305600307

Holyoke, Thomas T. 2004. Lobbying Strategies, Venue Selection, and Organized Interest Involvement at the U.S. Supreme Court. American Politics Research 32:170-197. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1532673X03259192

Hotelling, Harold. 1929. Stability in Competition. The Economic Journal 39:41-57. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2224214

Kollman, Ken. 1997. Inviting Friends to Lobby: Interest Groups, Ideological Bias, and Congressional Committees. American Journal of Political Science 41:519-544. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2111775

Kollman, Ken. 1998. Outside Lobbying: Public Opinion & Interest Group Strategies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Koshner, Andrew Jay. 1998. Solving the Puzzle of Interest Group Litigation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Kruskal, Joseph B., and Myron Wish. 1990. Multidimensional Scaling. London: SAGE Publications.

Lowery, David, and Holly Brasher. 2004. Organized Interests and American Government. New York: McGraw-Hill.

McGuire, Kevin T. 1994. Amici Curiae and Strategies for Gaining Access to the Supreme Court. Political Research Quarterly 47:793-820. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/448859 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/106591299404700402

McKay, Amy. 2008. A Simple Way of Estimating Interest Group Ideology. Public Choice 136:69-86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11127-008-9281-2

Nownes, Anthony J. 2001. Pressure and Power: Organized Interests in American Politics. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Poole, Keith T. 1998. Recovering a Basic Space from a Set of Issue Scales. American Journal of Political Science 42:954-993. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2991737

Poole, Keith T., and Tom Romer. 1985. Patterns of PAC Contributions to the 1980 Campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives. Public Choice 47:63-111. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00119353

Poole, Keith T., and Howard Rosenthal. 1997. Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schlozman, Kay Lehman, and John T. Tierney. 1986. Organized Interests and American Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

Schiffman, Susan S., M. Lance Reynolds, and Forrest W. Young. 1981. Introduction to Multidimensional Scaling: Theory, Methods, and Applications. New York: Academic Press.

Spaeth, Harold, Lee Epstein, Ted Ruger, Keith Whittington, Jeffrey Segal, and Andrew D. Martin. 2010. The Supreme Court Database: 2010 Release 02. 26 August 2010. http://scdb.wustl.edu/data.php. 12 November 2010.

Spriggs, James F. II, and Paul J. Wahlbeck. 1997. Amicus Curiae and the Role of Information at the Supreme Court. Political Research Quarterly 50:365-386. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/106591299705000206 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/448962

Takane, Yoshio, Forrest W. Young, and Jan De Leeuw. 1977. Nonmetric Individual Differences Multidimensional Scaling: An Alternating Least Squares Method with Optimal Scaling Features. Psychometrika 42:7-66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02293745

Torgerson, Warren S. 1958. Theory and Methods of Scaling. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Van Deun, Katrijn, and Luc Delbeke. 2000. Multidimensional Scaling. Located at http://www.mathpsyc.uni-bonn.de/doc/delbeke/delbeke.htm.

Young, Forrest W., and Robert M. Hamer, eds. 1987. Multidimensional Scaling: History Theory, and Applications. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Downloads

Published

2011-11-01

Issue

Vol. 32: Fall 2011

Section

Articles

License

Authors who publish with American Review of Politics agree to the following terms:

  1. The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.

  2. Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.

  3. The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:

    1. Attribution: other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;

    2. Non-Commercial: the materials may not be used for commercial purposes;

    3. Share Alike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.

  1. The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

  2. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a pre-publication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access). Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.

  3. Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.

  1. The Author represents and warrants that:

    1. the Work is the Author’s original work;

    2. the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;

    3. the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;

    4. the Work has not previously been published;

    5. the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and

    6. the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.

  2. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.