Decision Direction, Donations, and the Docket: Comparing Petitioners’ Campaign Finance Scores with the Ideological Coding of a Sample of Supreme Court Decisions from 2000-2001

Abstract

The Spaeth Database is widely used in legal research that aims to analyze and understand trends and patterns in the Supreme Court over time, as well as how justices make decisions. One variable in this Database, the ‘decision direction’ variable, seeks to classify decisions along ideological lines. In other words, the outcome of each case in the Database is coded as either conservative or liberal, or unspecifiable in certain instances. Scholars are increasingly questioning what exactly these terms mean, as while the Spaeth database includes the scheme that Spaeth employs to decide whether a decision will be coded as liberal or conservative, at no point does a more concrete definition of these ideologies appear. Understanding and examining what is meant by the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ in this context is essential to understanding any theories or models that are borne out of this Database. In addition, uncovering a deeper and more precise understanding of ideology at the Supreme Court is becoming increasingly important as the cases taken on become increasingly contentious and public faith in the institution begins to waver. This study uses Adam Bonica’s ‘Campaign Finance Scores’ (CF scores) as a proxy for the ideologies of the petitioners in 41 Supreme Court Cases from 2000 to 2021. Using simple linear regression, I find that in cases coded by Spaeth as conservative, the petitioners had, on average, slightly more conservative CF scores when they won compared with when they lost. For cases coded as liberal, the petitioners had, on average, slightly more liberal CF scores when they won compared with when they lost. Although on the surface, these findings may strengthen our faith in Spaeth’s coding scheme, the results lack statistical significance. This does not mean that there is no relationship between the ideology of the petitioner, as determined by their political donation record, and which ideological direction corresponds with their winning or losing in the case- especially given how small the very small sample size of cases from which the analysis draws upon. However, it is a small, but meaningful contribution to an important body of scholarship that aims to understand ideology at the Supreme Court beyond just the words ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.