Conformity Voting in the Supreme Court’s Certiorari Process.

In recent years, judicial scholars have recognized the significance of strategic, or outcome-prediction, voting in the US Supreme Court’s certiorari process (Caldeira, Wright, and Zorn 1999; Benesh, Brenner, and Spaeth 1998). However, the traditional strategic model has left both theoretical and empirical gaps in the study of justices? individual cert voting. This paper evaluates the existence of conformity voting in justices’ cert votes by examining votes cast on the Vinson, Warren, and Burger Courts, 1944-1986. First, I discuss three empirical problems with our current understanding of justices cert voting. Second, I propose a formal model of individual certiorari voting (the Public-Private Game) to solve the three problems. Finally, I present empirical support for the formal model. Using a binary logistic regression, this paper finds an effect that appears to be conformity voting, but is best explained as a pooling strategy resulting from a signaling game among justices during cert voting. These findings suggest that the our understanding of individual cert voting should be further scrutinized by game theory models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]