Honors Theses

Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Charles E. Smith, Jr.

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

The attitudinal model of the Supreme Court is now a well accepted and valid way to explain the voting behavior of justices, as judicial prefer- ences dictate the eventual voting that occurs in cases. While many studies have looked at overall judicial ideologies through a variety of different mea- sures, this paper is the first that looks at judicial ideology and determines preferences within a single doctrine through a question level analysis us- ing ideal point estimation. To explore this measure of ideology inside a single-issue area I use the Miranda doctrine and its progeny cases to score judicial votes on each question that the court addressed regarding Miranda. A long with determining these ideological scores and accompanying analy- sis, this thesis contains a complete history of the progeny cases. The results here indicate that judicial preferences can be scored within an issue area or single-doctrine as well as across issue areas as in the past, and opens up fur- ther avenues of research in separate issue areas a long with the revelations made about Miranda and the court already presented.

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