More than Votes? Voting and Language based Partisanship in the US Supreme Court
Biaoyan Fang, Trevor Cohn, Timothy Baldwin, Lea Frermann
Abstract
Understanding the prevalence and dynamics of justice partisanship and ideology in the US Supreme Court is critical in studying jurisdiction. Most research quantifies partisanship based on voting behavior, and oral arguments in the courtroom --- the last essential procedure before the final case outcome --- have not been well studied for this purpose. To address this gap, we present a framework for analyzing the language of justices in the courtroom for partisan signals, and study how partisanship in speech aligns with voting patterns. Our results show that the affiliated party of justices can be predicted reliably from their oral contributions. We further show a strong correlation between language partisanship and voting ideology.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
fang2023more,
title={More than Votes? Voting and Language based Partisanship in the {US} Supreme Court},
author={Biaoyan Fang and Trevor Cohn and Timothy Baldwin and Lea Frermann},
booktitle={The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
year={2023},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=jWL2GhQw5D}
}