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The U.S. Supreme Court has the privilege of discretionary jurisdiction, which, in recent years, has led to a limited docket of around only 80 cases per term. Given the low number of cases that the Court hears on the merits, paired with the ever increasing number of petitions for certiorari, the process of case selection in the U.S. Supreme Court has become a vital topic in the study of law and courts. One nearly universal finding regarding the agenda setting process has been that when the government or a federal agency is party to a case, the Supreme Court is far more likely to grant cert. Beyond this; however, there has not been enough attention paid in the literature to varying levels of deference to the government within and among different agencies. Moreover, while recent scholarship has empirically demonstrated that justices may vote strategically on matters of cert in general (see, for example, Caldiera, Wright, and Zorn 1999), little attention has been paid to the intersection of strategic judging and administrative law. Accordingly, in this paper, I examine how intra-branch politics, such as the ideological relationships between justices and the lower courts, and inter-branch politics, measured through the preferences of Congress, the president, and the public, can influence individual justice votes on certiorari when the federal government or an administrative agency is party to a case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has overwhelmingly found that courts defer to administrative agencies; however, much remains to be explained regarding the relationship between courts and agencies. In one sense, the question of deference to agencies is a question of the institutional power of the judiciary and of why an institution would willingly relinquish power. In another sense, it is a question about inter-branch relationships and cooperation based on the system of checks and balances and the separation of powers doctrine. For this reason, any true consideration of the interrelationship between agencies and courts must also examine the impact of the presidency, Congress, and the public in addition to examining other variables such as agency type and judge ideology that have been found significant in previous research. In this part of my dissertation, I attempt to test an inter-branch theory through analyses of decision making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals and in both the agenda-setting process and in decisions on the merits in the U.S. Supreme Court by tracing the same set of administrative cases through multiple levels of the courts while also examining external influences on the judiciary. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]