Sotomayor and Liberalism in the Strange World of Political Science

(sent to LawCourts in reply to an inquiry about how "liberal" Sotomayor is expected to be based upon newspaper-confirmation scores. I am a critic of how this whole enterprise works)

Mark:

Whatever may be anyone's private views, the prediction announced here is a function of a model Jeff uses. The logic of the model doesn't work that way you suggest . It doesn't offer predictions in the sense of prognostication. The output is solely a function of the input and the logic of the mathematical specification.

None of the variables account for the points you raise. The dependent variable coded by graduate students is rather "blind." If the decision favors a criminal defendant in a criminal case, for example, it gets thrown in the "liberal bin." If not, it gets the other one. The model doesn't consider what the substantive issue was, whether it shifted over time, whether it was mundane, whether it was big or small, whether the republican party actually supported it, whether anyone even cared, whether it instrumentally created "conservative doctrine" while disposing in favor of the defendant, and so forth. In short, there is no assessment of qualitative factors.

Furthermore, because about half of the docket is excluded from the prediction -- as are various justices from before the ascendancy of Earl Warren -- the prediction is apparently limited to civil liberties cases, and assumes (as all of these sorts of models do) that the past controls the future. (The past meaning only Warren Court forward).

A couple of important points to keep in mind. What drives these models statistically is the presence of justices who had rather extreme tendencies to have decided for or against civil liberties claimants during the Warren and anti-Warren periods of the Court. And more specifically, to have decided criminal cases, which comprise the bulk of the cases that are said to be "civil liberties." (You really could call it the criminal cases and remaining civil liberties docket if you wanted to). Hence, what drives the model are justices like Rehnquist who decided in favor of criminal-plus claimants about 20% of the time (roughly) and the big-time Warren justices, some of whom hit the 80% mark.

Today's justices are more around the 33-65 range -- excluding, I think, Thomas, who is the only one still in the 20s the last time I checked (a few years ago). [I quit doing this work for obvious reasons]. I think Scalia is around 29 or something. (Even he may have made it to 30, I don't know). Jeff's model indeed assumes that the old guard is still there when the prediction is made, because all that the model sees are a bunch of numbers in Stata.

Even so, you will note that the model only produces a 62. Why? Because most justices for which we have data are not that directional when it comes to deciding for or against the claimants. The non-directional justices clog the model.

What is interesting about this is that if Sotomayor does decide whatever civil liberties cases she does -- even if they are not as heavy in criminal cases or anything like the ones from the 60s and 70s -- it makes no real difference. If she comes out a wild 78 or 80 (like the good old days), you can say "the newspaper scores were right about her." But if she winds up at 60, you can say "the model was right." And if she is anything near this side of 50, the industry continues. Next time, the model simply shaves the prediction for someone like her to a 60 or 59 or something (shaving for the mistake). So long as Rehnquist and the Warren people are in the Stata machine, and so long as the docket is shaved, it can't lose. (Plus, take away the old justices).

So in conclusion, there is in fact nothing to the prediction that considers anything you raised.

Regards and thanks.

Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
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Sotomayor and Liberalism in the World of Ideology Scholars

(sent to LawCourts)

someone wrote: "Yes, according to my editorial scores, Sotomayor is the most liberal justice confirmed since Marshall, but remember, there have only been two Democrats confirmed since then, Ginsburg and Breyer."

... let's be clear. According to the "editorial sources," she is thought to have only the score value generated by that procedure. That's all the measure says. Scientifically, the scores do not measure her "ideology" (whatever that means).

And with respect to the announced prediction of what political science calls her "votes," we probably should note a few disclaimers:

1. If you include the whole docket and all of the justices for which there is data, the predictive relationship is extremely paltry.

2. Even if you cherry-pick the docket and the justices, whatever results you get are fundamentally driven by the few justices with extreme propensity for direction under the "liberal index" -- most of whom are no longer there. And even this predicts that Sotomayor will be closer to neutrality (50%) than her alleged reputation (78). And of course, you don't need any newspaper scores to guess that Sotomayor will be in the 60s -- the safe money already has her around 65. (Flipping coins puts her at 50. The PRE on honest logit models was never impressive with these scores).

3. One of the biggest problems these models have is their misleading conclusions. The dependent variable (the so-called "liberal index") is quite peculiar because it doesn't have any empirical or substantive relationship to true "liberal voting." It's just called that by people pretending to do the "science." After all, the great majority of the coding doesn't concern exemplar issues that make up the belief-spectrum in the political system. And it doesn't concern issues that appear in campaigns or the culture war and so forth. In fact, one has to have a great deal of ideology himself or herself in order to see or call this measure "liberal voting." You have to sort of think like a creation scientist would when they study the world. In fact, one might think of political scientists who try to catch "ideology" this way as being sort of "ideology-creation scientists."

When scientists study the external world, they develop rigid designators for the things in the world they have "pinned down." I have always found it extremely curious that in ideology-centered, quantitative political science, no one attempts to talk precisely and honestly about the empirical things they actually observe. If they would, they would find that Sotomayor has a 78 on what appears to be some sort of exemplar-conceived political-issue barometer by a small media/journalist workgroup acting within a discreet time in American politics. And that this thing, when combined with other such prejudice workshops, has some sort of relationship to what we might call a rather badly-conceived yes-no claimant-priority arrangement. (And only when dockets and justices are constructed).

But that's not the way it comes out. It's always comes out as "the ideology going in was measured by the scientists," and "the scientists confirmed that ideology was coming out on the other side." I mean, it reminds me of one who would say, "first they were baptized, and then they went to heaven."

Regards and thanks.

Judicial Common Space Scores, Science and Language

(sent to lawcourts)
 
Hi Chad.

First, thanks so much for sharing this.

Could you tell us a little about the semantic assumptions in the naming of the scores? For example, if someone were to call them the "legal philosophy space scores," would they be wrong? Or, what if they called them something like the "relative casuistry differential" -- would that be off the mark? When you tell others that you have "common space ideology measured," you surely don't mean "conventional ideology," right? And there is, of course, no way for a judge to decide a case that doesn't result in having an "ideology score?" And, if we were to develop measures of this sort of thing for scholars when they make decisions as a group that require judgment -- even the grading of exams -- they, too, would have "common space ideology?"  

I think I know a little about these scores. I admit I haven't paid great attention to them, but I have paid slight to moderate. And as I remember perusing them a while back, I've always found it curious what political science means when it calls them "ideology scores" and why empirical researchers would adopt non-scientific vocabulary for work such as this. Why not actually call the scores by a scientifically jargonized name, as real science does when it studies something in the external world? You do agree, after all, that the only thing quantitative models actually observe in the external world are the indices themselves, not the things they say they are seeing (e.g., "ideology")?  It seems to me that, somewhere down the road, you all may want to develop a science for the creation of indeces like this that could result in a jargonized lexicon that spoke the language of science.

Because as long as you are out there saying you've got "ideology" empirically observed, you really are in danger of sounding like creation science. There is no place in the external world where "ideology" is; the word itself is a normative conclusion about the status of beliefs. It would be something similar to saying, "I've got their epistemology measured." Imagine someone saying, "I have their correctness measured."  "So and So has a correctness score of X." You could, of course, find things in the external world to measure that bear upon a debate about these things, but you really can't say you have the things measured, because they, themselves, are fundamentally accusations about about the normative content of beliefs.  

I really want to help political science become either real science, or -- better yet -- good philosophy.

Regards and thanks. 

Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Redesigned Website: http://seanwilson.org/
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860
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What's Wrong With Quantitative Ideology Models Used by The Political Science Social Club

Hello Ted.

1. I'm glad you share some sympathies toward my orientation. You are not right, of course, if you mean to say that i cannot productively converse on this subject with you (or anyone). Indeed, my contributions would be quite well thought out, and I imagine both of our ideas about the subject would have benefited. I do understand your concerns, however. Talking with a Wittgensteinian can be a headache. 

2. I think the thing that you must understand from my perspective is that I am a philosopher who was trained both as a lawyer and as an empirical watcher of what this group of scholars call (quite colorfully) "judicial politics." Because I am imminently familiar with philosophy of law, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, Wittgenstein, and "the quantitative arts," it bothers me to no end to see the silliness emanating from powerful segments of one social club being repeated by, and incorporated into, another. I am now seeing more often in books here and there, lawyers starting to say things like "segal and spaeth proved this," "martin and quinn measure  ideology," "the attitudinal model says," etc., etc., without the faintest idea of what the proof or claims therein consist of, what is meant in the charge of "ideology," or how any of that is actually accounted for. Truthfully, what happens is this: a law scholar looks for
footnotes because they think it makes for better "scholarship." It doesn't. It makes only a club product.

Listen to me very carefully. What quantitative political science does is it constructs some index and then gives it a NAME rather than a rigid designator, as all other empirical sciences do. They also make-up the index as a CREATIVE act, not from a science of observation. So there is no real science to the instrumentation. All they ever have is a mathematicized rhetoric. They also don't even realize as a social club that science of this sort, if it were to exist, could only observe its index, not the thing they are calling it. And so, you go to these conferences and out they come. "I'm using this ideology measure because it helps me the best," "I'm using the other ideology measure." "I'm using all of them to make people happy." At one job talk where I used to work one person once said (no kidding), "here are the dots. If I was wrong, the dots would be over there." One of my favorite things to look for at one of these conferences is when someone
claims the "attitudinal model" to be an "elegant theory." This always alerts me to the fact that the scholar knows nothing about philosophy and is at the conference for the art of mixing math with rhetoric. (It also reminds me that the club has a "Hell's Angels" component to it).

Not only do none of these indicies actually measure "ideology," very often the speaker doesn't have a refined idea of what this concept entails among its competitors. Lacking requisite understanding in philosophy of law, language and science, the club, nonetheless, produces its books, and they pass this numerology on to one another like communion -- and before you know it, now the lawyers are saying it, too. Now its on Oyez. And then when one of the favorite rituals of these two clubs comes along -- "this one is the liberal one," "that one was active," "this one used his attitudes" "that one cheated because he liked the result" -- out comes the "science" into the carnival.

I mean, really. One ought to film the thing and put it in Seinfeld or something. 

Regards, Ted, and go Steelers.           
 
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
New Website: http://seanwilson.org
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Martin Quinn Scores and Ideology

Ted, since you seem to know about this, can you tell me what these scores actually say about "ideology" and how you think they have anything to do with the discussion of who's more liberal and so forth? I'd really like to hear someone explain that to me. You know, for the life of me, I never understood why Oyez uses these scores as an indicator of "ideology," other than the fact that the owner of the site doesn't know anything about them. So maybe we can get all of that cleared up in here right now.

Ted, why do these scores map "justice ideology" and what in creation are you talking about when you say that? Who's left and right. Can you actually be left one day and center the next (doesn't that change the sense of talking)?

Because it seems to me that the scores are a kind of casuistry differential index of only dispositional choices. And that they are quite different from what other indicies say, and that, to declare them "ideology," one has to adopt a rather peculiar vernacular. (To say nothing, of course, that, when mapping "casuistry space," any set of choices one makes gets mapped. There is no way for the justice to not have "ideology"). So, what relevance does this have to the "who's the real liberal" pie-throwing ritual that one so often sees? More importantly, what relevance does it have to ANY discussion in jurisprudence?

Here's what I am saying to you,  Ted, and to the rest of the lawyers who know where the web site is. If Martin Quinn scores estimate anything, it would more be in the neighborhood of a set of a mathematicized choice-differential evidencing, perhaps, a sort of IDEATION, not ideology. You might say of these scores, "oh look at justice x's ideating pattern relative to y on the issue of every disposition (affirm/reverse)."  (Of course, even this is problematic because there is no measure of ideation, there is only a set of scores generated from a set of choices. You have to infer from the choices that a ideating path of some sort accompanied the choice).  

So now, tell us how this plugs into the prior discussion, because I can't see it.