Doctoral Dissertation Research on Interactions between Congress and Supreme Court

Ohio State University Research Foundation -Do Not Use, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract Doctoral Dissertation Research on Interactions Between Congress and the Supreme Court Roman Ivanchenko, Ohio State University (advisor: Lawrence Baum) Conflicts between Congress and the Supreme Court have become more frequent and more dramatic in the past few years. Less dramatic but more important is the continuous interaction between Congress and the Court that helps to shape public policy in the United States. Scholars have studied this interaction, giving particular attention to the ways that Congress responds to Supreme Court decisions that interpret federal statutes. This scholarship has taught us a good deal, but it is limited in some important respects. This dissertation is intended to address those limitations and thus to illuminate the relationship between Congress and the Court. First, the dissertation considers the influence of both Congress and the Court on each other. The Court's power to rule that federal statutes are unconstitutional gives members of Congress reason to write statutes in a way that will withstand constitutional challenges. For this reason, the dissertation examines how the prospect of judicial review shapes congressional choices as well as how those choices affect the Court's scrutiny of statutes that are challenged on constitutional grounds. Second, the dissertation takes a broad view of the motivations that influence action by Congress and the Court. For convenience, scholars typically assume that both members of Congress and Supreme Court justices make choices based solely on their positions on the ideological spectrum. Of course, both members and justices have more complex motivations than that. Along with ideological considerations, the dissertation takes into account an interest in the quality of public policy, what it calls "suitability." Thus, when members of Congress consider legislation and when Supreme Court justices determine whether legislation is constitutionally acceptable, they act on their interest in effective policy (including its consistency with the Constitution) as well as its ideological content. The dissertation captures these considerations in a mathematical model that produces hypotheses about the conditions that affect decisions by Congress and the Supreme Court. Those hypotheses are tested in three sets of empirical analyses that use data gathered on Congress and the Court, employing statistical models that were chosen because they fit the processes to be analyzed. Two analyses concern legislation that is challenged on constitutional grounds in the Supreme Court. The first analysis looks closely at decisions of the Court during its long period of stable membership from 1994 to 2005, while the second examines the fate of legislation in the courts from 1987 to 2000. The final analysis examines decisions in Congress from 1977 to 2002, specifically whether and how the possibility that the Supreme Court might invalidate a statute influences the ideological content and suitability of the statutes that Congress enacts. The mathematical model and the empirical findings of the dissertation will illuminate the ways that Congress and the Supreme Court interact in constitutional law. The approach taken in the research is also applicable to other inter-branch interactions in American government, and thus it can contribute to our understanding of the complex interplay between institutions that shapes public policy in the United States.