Agenda Setting for the Rehnquist Court Judicial Database, 1986-2004 Terms

伦奎斯特法院议程设置的理论重要性鉴于最近发布的布莱克门文件，以及其他原始数据来源正在被用于NSF赞助的汉堡法院的议程设置研究，现在对伦奎斯特法院的议程设置的研究是可能的。到目前为止，议程设置研究人员--这对于理解法院为什么选择从数千个请愿审查的案件中裁决少数几个没有代表性的案件至关重要--不得不根据因变量进行选择，因为缺乏关于被拒绝移送的案件的数据。到2007年底，汉堡法院将克服这一重点的缺陷。但这个法院在一代人之前就结束了，研究人员缺乏数据来进行比较聚焦(更不用说货币了)，这无论从理论还是经验角度都是如此有价值。伦奎斯特法院增加的可比数据(1987-2005年)克服了这一缺陷。关于议程设置的未知确定性和质量的推测性推论从此将承认在理论和经验上都有可靠的基础。

ABSTRACTTheoretical Importance of Agenda Setting for the Rehnquist Court Given the recent release of the Blackmun Papers, which, along with other original data sources are being used in the NSF-sponsored agenda setting research of the Burger Court, research into the agenda setting of the Rehnquist Court is now possible. Until this time, agenda setting researchers, which is crucially important to an understanding of why the Court chooses to decide a small unrepresentative handful of cases from the thousands petitioned for its review, have had to select on the dependent variable because of the lack of data about the cases denied certiorari. By the end of 2007, the invalidity of this focus will be surmounted for the Burger Court. But this Court ended a generation ago and researchers lack the data for a comparative focus (to say nothing of currency), which is so valuable from both a theoretical and empirical standpoint. The addition of comparable data for the Rehnquist Court (1987-2005) overcomes this shortcoming. Speculative inferences of unknown certainty and quality about agenda setting will henceforth admit to a sound grounding theoretically and empirically.