Signaling, Politicization, and the Solicitor General's Influence on Supreme Court Justices.

In this paper, we synthesize and extend theoretical accounts of the solicitor general's (SG) influence on the votes of Supreme Court justices. In particular, we argue that the level of politicization exhibited by the SG can affect both the foundation of political support the SG enjoys from ideologically proximate justices and the strength of "outlier signals" offered in particular cases. When the SG exhibits increased politicization, outlier signals are likely to be especially useful to ideologically distant justices and, therefore, predictive of their behavior. When the SG is less politicized, outlier signal briefs should be more equivalent to mainstream briefs, and, therefore, relatively less informative. Analyzing justices' votes in civil liberties and civil rights cases, we find empirical support for our theoretical claims. In particular, we find that the effects of politicization in the Office of the Solicitor General and outlier signals contained in individual case briefs are conditional on one another and on the degree of ideological divergence between each justice and the SG. This study offers a more complete account of the ways that political dynamics shape executive branch litigation and linkages between the president and the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]