Supreme Court Ideology
With the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts is likely to be the median justice. How has the ideology of the median justice and chief justice shifted over time?
Data sources: Andrew D. Martin and Kevin M. Quinn, Lee Epstein
Tools:
- R
- Adobe Illustrator
- ai2html
Project Description
With so much discussion of the ideological changes in the Supreme Court, I wanted to visualize the court's historical ideological shifts. In researching the topic and methods of measurement, I saw mostly line charts of individual justices over time. I wanted to do something different and make it easier to track changes in the median justice and chief justice - the two court members most important to its overall ideology.
Using R, I imported the Martin-Quinn data set, which assigns a score to each justice for each term, and the Supreme Court Database, which provides additional information on justices' term dates and successors. After some analysis, I charted the data using a color scale to indicate ideology score and a marker for the chief justice.
I imported the R chart into Illustrator, decided on a vertical orientation, and added the annotations. To add more context, I plotted the chief and median justice scores for the longer chief justice terms in the same color scale. Finally, given the data, I framed the story to focus on the overwhelmingly conservative ideology in the measured history.
