The dynamics of ideology drift among U.S. Supreme Court justices: A functional data analysis.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Zhou X
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9269944 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:Previous studies suggest a significant role of language in the court room, yet none has identified a definitive correlation between vocal characteristics and court outcomes. This paper demonstrates that voice-based snap judgments based solely on the introductory sentence of lawyers arguing in front of the Supreme Court of the United States predict outcomes in the Court. In this study, participants rated the opening statement of male advocates arguing before the Supreme Court between 1998 and 2012 in terms of masculinity, attractiveness, confidence, intelligence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness. We found significant correlation between vocal characteristics and court outcomes and the correlation is specific to perceived masculinity even when judgment of masculinity is based only on less than three seconds of exposure to a lawyer's speech sample. Specifically, male advocates are more likely to win when they are perceived as less masculine. No other personality dimension predicts court outcomes. While this study does not aim to establish any causal connections, our findings suggest that vocal characteristics may be relevant in even as solemn a setting as the Supreme Court of the United States.
| S-EPMC5063312 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveTo predict take-up of private health insurance and Medicaid following the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act (ACA).Data sourcesData came from three large employers and a sampling of premiums from ehealthinsurance.com. We supplemented the employer data with information on state Medicaid eligibility and costs from the Kaiser Family Foundation. National predictions were based on the MEPS Household Component.Study designWe estimated a conditional logit model of health plan choice in the large group market. Using the coefficients from the choice model, we predicted take-up in the group and individual health insurance markets. Following ACA implementation, we added choices to the individual market corresponding to plans that will be available in state and federal exchanges. Depending on eligibility for premium subsidies, we reduced the out-of-pocket premiums for those choices. We simulated several possible patterns for states opting out of the Medicaid expansion, as allowed by the Supreme Court.Principal findingsThe ACA will increase coverage substantially in the private insurance market and Medicaid. HSAs will remain desirable in both the individual and employer markets.ConclusionsIf states opt out of the Medicaid expansion, this could increase the federal cost of health reform, while reducing the number of newly covered lives.
| S-EPMC3626326 | biostudies-literature
Project description:How does the public assess the Supreme Court and its work? Using data from three surveys conducted over a span of ten years, we show that individuals' policy preferences drive evaluations of the Court and its willingness to reform the Court. We find strong evidence that the Court's hybrid legal-political nature enables a unique form of policy-motivated reasoning: respondents who agree with Court outputs view the Court and its work as more "legal" in nature, while those who disagree view both as more "political." Our findings stand in contrast to longstanding views in the literature that the public views the Court as a fundamentally different sort of institution that stands largely separate from politics. The fact that policy attitudes powerfully inform the public's assessment of the Court has crucial implications for the ongoing debates over Supreme Court power.
| S-EPMC10664892 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The art in law, like medicine, is in its humanity. Nowhere is the humanity in law more poignant than in BC Supreme Court Justice Ian Pitfield's recent judgment in the legal case aimed at protecting North America's only supervised injection facility (SIF) as a healthcare program: PHS Community Services Society versus the Attorney General of Canada. In order to protect the SIF from politicization, the PHS Community Services Society, the community organization that established and operates the program, along with two people living with addiction and three lawyers working for free, pro bono publico, took the federal government of Canada to court. The courtroom struggle that ensued was akin to a battle between David and Goliath. The judge in the case, Justice Pitfield, ruled in favour of the PHS and gave the Government of Canada one year to bring the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) into compliance with the country's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If parliament fails to do so, then the CDSA will evaporate from enforceability and law in June of 2009. Despite the fact that there are roughly twelve million intravenous drug addiction users in the world today, politics and prejudice oards harm reduction are still a barrier to the widespread application of the "best medicine" available for serious addicts. Nowhere is this clearer than in the opposition by conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his faithful servant, federal health minister Tony Clement, towards Vancouver's SIF ("Insite"). The continued angry politicization of addiction will only lead to the tragic loss of life, as addicts are condemned to death from infectious diseases (HIV & hepatitis) and preventable overdoses. In light of the established facts in science, medicine and now law, political opposition to life-saving population health programs (including SIFs) to address the effects of addiction is a kind of implicit capital punishment for the addicted. This commentary examines the socio-political context of the legal case and the major figures that contributed to it. It reviews Justice Pitfield's ruling, a judgment that has brought Canada one step closer to putting a stop to addiction's death row where intravenous drug users are needlessly, for political and ideological reasons alone, forced to face increased risks of death due to AIDS, hepatitis and overdose.
| S-EPMC2611970 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundUnder structural conditions of non-governability, most players in the policy arena in Israel turn to two main channels that have proven effective in promoting the policies they seek: the submission of petitions to the High Court of Justice and making legislative amendments through the Economic Arrangements Law initiated by the Ministry of Finance. Nevertheless, an analysis of the principal trends emerging from the High Court of Justice rulings and legislative amendments through the Economic Arrangements Law indicates that these channels are open to influence, primarily by forces that are essentially neo-liberal. Little is known about the effects of these trends on the right to healthcare services, which in Israel has not been legislated as an independent constitutional law in Basic Laws.MethodsWe use four major legal cases decided by the Supreme Court of Israel in the past 10 years where the Court reviewed new legislative initiatives proposed by the Economic Arrangements Law in the area of healthcare. We utilize an institutional approach in our analysis.ResultsA neo-institutional analysis of the legal cases demonstrates that petitions against the Economic Arrangements Law in the area of healthcare services have been denied, even though the Court uses strong rhetoric against that law and the government more generally in addressing issues that concern access to healthcare services and reforms in the healthcare system. This move strengthens the trend toward a neo-liberal public policy and significantly weakens the legal protection of the right to healthcare services.ConclusionIn deciding petitions against the Economic Arrangements Law in the area of healthcare, the Supreme Court allows the Ministry of Finance to be a dominant player in the formation of public policy. In doing so, it may be promoting a goal of strengthening its position as a political institution that aspires to increase the public's trust in the judiciary and especially in the Supreme Court itself, in addition to exercising judicial restraint and allowing more leeway to the executive and legislative branches more generally.
| S-EPMC6258264 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Significance Leveraging three unique surveys collected over a decade that ask members of the public about the policy issues before the US Supreme Court, we show how the court stands relative to the public. As we demonstrate, the court has, since 2020, become much more conservative than the public and is now more similar to Republicans in its ideological position on key issues. We also find that members of the public update their beliefs about the court's ideology when its composition and rulings change. Even so, many members of the public currently underestimate the court's conservative leaning, which in turn makes them less likely to support making changes to the institution than they would otherwise.
| S-EPMC9214517 | biostudies-literature
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC4216277 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here, we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connectivity (FC) across common fMRI tasks. Using convolutional neural networks, we develop predictive models of ideology using FC from fMRI scans for nine standard task-based settings in a novel cohort of healthy adults (n = 174, age range: 18 to 40, mean = 21.43) from the Ohio State University Wellbeing Project. Our analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives have noticeable and discriminative differences in FC that can be identified with high accuracy using contemporary artificial intelligence methods and that such analyses complement contemporary models relying on socio-economic and survey-based responses. FC signatures from retrieval, empathy, and monetary reward tasks are identified as important and powerful predictors of conservatism, and activations of the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus are most strongly associated with political affiliation. Although the direction of causality is unclear, this study suggests that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior run much deeper than previously thought.
| S-EPMC9291242 | biostudies-literature
Project description:To pave the road towards precision medicine in cancer, patients with similar biology ought to be grouped into same cancer subtypes. Utilizing high-dimensional multiomics datasets, integrative approaches have been developed to uncover cancer subtypes. Recently, Graph Neural Networks have been discovered to learn node embeddings utilizing node features and associations on graph-structured data. Some integrative prediction tools have been developed leveraging these advances on multiple networks with some limitations. Addressing these limitations, we developed SUPREME, a node classification framework, which integrates multiple data modalities on graph-structured data. On breast cancer subtyping, unlike existing tools, SUPREME generates patient embeddings from multiple similarity networks utilizing multiomics features and integrates them with raw features to capture complementary signals. On breast cancer subtype prediction tasks from three datasets, SUPREME outperformed other tools. SUPREME-inferred subtypes had significant survival differences, mostly having more significance than ground truth, and outperformed nine other approaches. These results suggest that with proper multiomics data utilization, SUPREME could demystify undiscovered characteristics in cancer subtypes that cause significant survival differences and could improve ground truth label, which depends mainly on one datatype. In addition, to show model-agnostic property of SUPREME, we applied it to two additional datasets and had a clear outperformance.
| S-EPMC10481254 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Long INterspersed Elements-1 (L1s) constitute >17% of the human genome and still actively transpose in it. Characterizing L1 transposition across the genome is critical for understanding genome evolution and somatic mutations. However, to date, L1 insertion and fixation patterns have not been studied comprehensively. To fill this gap, we investigated three genome-wide data sets of L1s that integrated at different evolutionary times: 17,037 de novo L1s (from an L1 insertion cell-line experiment conducted in-house), and 1,212 polymorphic and 1,205 human-specific L1s (from public databases). We characterized 49 genomic features-proxying chromatin accessibility, transcriptional activity, replication, recombination, etc.-in the ±50 kb flanks of these elements. These features were contrasted between the three L1 data sets and L1-free regions using state-of-the-art Functional Data Analysis statistical methods, which treat high-resolution data as mathematical functions. Our results indicate that de novo, polymorphic, and human-specific L1s are surrounded by different genomic features acting at specific locations and scales. This led to an integrative model of L1 transposition, according to which L1s preferentially integrate into open-chromatin regions enriched in non-B DNA motifs, whereas they are fixed in regions largely free of purifying selection-depleted of genes and noncoding most conserved elements. Intriguingly, our results suggest that L1 insertions modify local genomic landscape by extending CpG methylation and increasing mononucleotide microsatellite density. Altogether, our findings substantially facilitate understanding of L1 integration and fixation preferences, pave the way for uncovering their role in aging and cancer, and inform their use as mutagenesis tools in genetic studies.
| S-EPMC7743743 | biostudies-literature