Congressional Control or Judicial Independence: The Determinants of U.S. Supreme Court Labor-Relations Decisions, 1949-1988

Journal article by Pablo T. Spiller; Rand Journal of Economics, Vol. 23, 1992

Journal Article Excerpt

Congressional control or judicial independence:
the determinants of U.S. Supreme Court
labor-relations decisions, 1949-1988

Pablo T. Spiller ^*
and
Rafael Gely ^**

Extending the approach to congressional and regulatory institutions developed by Shepsle
and Weingast, this article introduces an ideologically motivated judiciary. The model yields
empirically refutable implications which are then tested in the framework of modelling the
Court's decisions on industrial labor relations. Using information on politicians' ADA scores,
the composition of the Court, and the decisions of the Court, we obtain estimates of (a) the
position of the Court in relation to the relevant members of Congress, and (b) the determinants
of labor policy through the years. We find, first, that the Court was constrained by Congress
over at least half of the period. Second, a 10-point increase in the ADA rating of the relevant
member of Congress, or in the imputed ADA rating of the Supreme Court, increases the
probability of a pro-union decision by approximately eight percentage points. Third, the
imputed political preferences of the Court seem to be well explained simply by its political
composition. Fourth, the Court does not seem to defer to the NLRB. Finally, though parsi-
monious, our model is a relatively good predictor of the Court's decisions, and superior to
both a simple political bargaining model without institutional content and a nonsophisticated
or purely legalistic judicial decision-making model. Our results, then, suggest that the Court
responds, albeit indirectly, to interest group pressures.

1. Introduction

■ That courts shape regulatory policy is no news to regulation scholars. A cursory look
at some of the literally hundreds of articles on the political economy of regulation during
the last three decades (see Noll ( 1989 ) or Joskow and Rose ( 1989 )) will show that a large

____________________

University of Illinois.

^**

Texas A&M University.

The final version of this article was written while Spiller was a Visiting Professor of Business, Energy and
Law at the University of California at Berkeley. Support from the Lilly Endowment, through the Center for the
Study of the Economy and the State, at the University of Chicago, from the Institute for Government and Public
Affairs, through its Ameritech Research Fellowship, from the University of Illinois Research Board, and from the
National Science Foundation (through grant no. SES-9008140) to Spiller is gratefully acknowledged. Preliminary
versions of this article were presented at Johns Hopkins University. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the

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proportion cite court cases as important determinants of public policy. Yet this literature
has paid minimal analytical attention to the role of administrative procedures and the courts
(see, however, Joskow ( 1974 )), focusing instead on analyzing the relation between interest
groups, elected officials (Congress, the president), regulatory agencies, and policy outcomes.
Traditional analyses of court decisions, on the other hand, have emphasized legal rather
than interest group considerations. Thus it appears that scholars could choose between a
legal-based or an interest group-based way of analyzing regulatory policy making. Conven
tional wisdom, however, suggests that court decisions are not bound exclusively by legal
considerations, but that ideology and politics play an important role in judicial decision
making.¹

So far there has been no attempt to develop an empirically refutable model that can
improve our understanding of the systematic influence of the courts on regulatory policy
and to integrate their actions with those of elected officials. In what follows we develop such
a model. We implement this model to the U.S. Supreme Court's merit decisions concerning
the interpretation of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. We provide here the first
systematic evidence on the role of politics and ideology in judicial decision making and on
the political sophistication of the court (i.e., justices understand, and act according to, the
expected evolution of the game). In particular, we are able to reject a purely legalistic view
of judicial decision making. Our model suggests that justices are politically sophisticated,
as they seem to take into consideration the ensuing political game that follows their decision.
As a consequence, politics matter in their decision making. Furthermore, we show that for
most cases in the sample, and for most of the period, court decisions have been constrained
by the preferences of elected officials (i.e., legislators and the president).

In this article we implement the framework developed in Gely and Spiller ( 1990 ). We
use the rational choice approach to political and regulatory institutions (e.g., Congress, the
president, and the administrative agencies) developed by the important work of Weingast,
Shepsle, and Noll, ...

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Congressional Control or Judicial Independence: The Determinants of U.S. Supreme Court Labor-Relations Decisions, 1949-1988

Journal article by Pablo T. Spiller; Rand Journal of Economics, Vol. 23, 1992

Journal Article Excerpt

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