Analyzing Voting from a New Perspective: Applying Spectral Analysis to the US Supreme Court.

The goal of this paper is to present a generalization of spectral analysis as a new tool for political scientists. Spectral analysis (or Fourier analysis) is the foundation of most time-series analysis and many other types of analysis in engineering and the natural sciences. This paper draws on recent work in mathematics to show how the powerful machinery of spectral analysis can be applied to a non-time series subject in the social sciences: analysis of voting on the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]