Underlying ideological voting patterns could thus be determined. As stated, non-unanimous affirmative action cases were the bases for my analysis. Non-unanimity is the standard for scaling court decisions since cases without controversy, or which are decided unanimously, reveal little information regarding a judge's ideological preferences. Essentially, after studying the affirmative action cases and assigning each justice's vote to an ideological spectrum, I took the sum of the number of liberal versus conservative votes of each justice, and from these summations, devised a coefficient of reproducibility. The latter is a statistical representation of the likelihood that the justices' voting propensities are generalizeable across justices and courts.
Political party is correlated with ideology in the study.
The coefficient of reproducibility determines the degree to which the sample set of cases scale, that is, are reproducible across courts. Using the Chi-square statistical model, I established the likelihood that this relationship would have by chance alone occurred. Please leave your questions or suggestions. If you desire a response, include a valid email address in your message . I am compelled in releasing this information at this time in the light of the recent flurry of court activity defining the 2000 presidential election.