Doctoral Dissertation Research: Institutional Influences on Agenda-Setting in State Courts of Last Resort

政治机构在影响政府对不同问题的关注和所采取的政策类型方面发挥着重要作用，包括法院和其他司法机构。 现有的研究主要集中在美国最高法院，但由于最高法院并没有随着时间的推移发生重大的制度变化，我们对制度规则和程序如何影响法院议程的理解是有限的。 该项目开发了一个广义的模型的司法机构设置，占法官和诉讼当事人的动机和行为，在特定的制度结构内相互作用。该项目评估了影响法院议程的体制特征，包括法院管辖权的性质（强制性与自由裁量权）和批准上诉的规则。该项目从经验上测试了几个假设，从这个模型与数据来自州最高法院。 该项目将通过使用自动文本分析以及监督主题编码来衡量2000年代出版的所有记录的州最高法院判决的问题关注度和程序路径，从而在法院判决分析方面进行创新。在这样做的过程中，该项目将创建第一个被这些法院驳回而未就案情作出决定的自由裁量上诉数据集。这些措施与预计会影响个别法官和诉讼当事人行为的机构特征数据相结合。对这些数据的分析将有助于了解司法程序规则以及法官和诉讼当事人的个人动机如何影响法院的总体政策议程和法院审理的具体案件。因此，这项研究包括第一次全面研究国家一级的上诉法院设置在美国，并有可能告知政策决定，司法选择和保留，制度设计和司法管理。 该项目还将有助于对学生进行社会科学方法方面的培训。

Political institutions play an important role in shaping the government's attention to different issues and the types of policies adopted, including by courts and other judicial bodies. Existing research has focused on the U.S. Supreme Court, but because the Court has not undergone significant institutional change over time, our understanding of how institutional rules and procedures influence courts' agendas is limited. This project develops a generalized model of judicial agenda-setting that accounts for both the motives and behavior of judges and litigants, interacting within specific institutional structures. The project evaluates institutional characteristics that shape courts' agendas, including the nature of the court's jurisdiction (mandatory vs. discretionary) and the rules for granting appeals,. The project empirically tests several hypotheses derived from this model with data from state supreme courts. The project will innovate in the analysis of court decisions by using automated text analysis in addition to supervised topic coding to measure the issue attention and procedural path of all recorded state supreme court decisions published in the 2000s. In doing so, the project will create the first dataset of discretionary appeals that were rejected by those courts without a decision on the merits. These measures are combined with data on institutional characteristics that are predicted to influence the actions of individual judges and litigants. Analysis of these data will contribute to understanding how judicial rules of procedure and the individual motivations of judges and litigants influence a court's overall policy agenda and the specific cases heard by the court. This research thus comprises the first comprehensive study of state-level appellate agenda-setting in the United States, and has the potential to inform policy decisions regarding judicial selection and retention, institutional design, and judicial administration. The project will also contribute to training students in methods in the social sciences.