| Summary: | This study employed a social-psychological approach to study how and why judicial decisions were made and to present a substantive interpretation of major post-World War II trends in the Supreme Court's policy-making on the basis of aggregate data measuring both manifest voting behavior and inferred political attitudes of the justices. Besides recording the position taken by each justice on the cases considered, several scales were constructed reflecting the ideological implications of judicial decisions. About a third of the decisions included in this study dealt with questions of political rights and civil liberties, and were used to create a political liberalism scale, with the following subcomponents: fair procedure, voting equality, political freedom, religious freedom, racial equality, and civic equality. Another third of the cases, concerned with questions of economic policy, were classified as a scale of economic liberalism, with two major components -- governmental regulation of economic activities and support for labor unions. The remaining third of the sampled decisions were used to construct minor scales: judicial activism and judicial centralization, focusing on the Supreme Court's own political role, a fiscal claims scale dealing with the financial interests of the federal government, and a nationalization scale concerned with the extent to which a justice tended to uphold the claims and interests of the national government.
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