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

政治机构在塑造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，但由于法院没有经历重大的制度变革，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。该项目开发了一个司法议程设置的通用模型，该模型解释了法官和诉讼当事人在特定制度结构内相互作用的动机和行为。该项目评估影响法院议程的体制特征，包括法院管辖权的性质（强制性与自由裁量性）和准予上诉的规则。该项目用来自各州最高法院的数据对该模型得出的几个假设进行了实证检验。该项目将通过使用自动文本分析和监督主题编码来创新法院判决的分析，以衡量2000年代公布的所有记录的州最高法院判决的问题关注和程序路径。在此过程中，该项目将创建第一个自由裁量上诉的数据集，这些上诉是在没有对案情作出裁决的情况下被法院驳回的。这些措施与预计会影响法官和诉讼当事人个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理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，这项研究是对美国州一级上诉议程设置的第一次全面研究，并有可能为有关司法选择和保留、制度设计和司法行政的政策决定提供信息。该项目还将有助于训练学生掌握社会科学的方法。

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.