The Nature and Extent of Attitudinal Decisionmaking in the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Nature and Extent of Attitudinal Decision Making in the Supreme Court of Canada According to the most prominent proponents of the Attitudinal Model, justices on the United States Supreme Court decide cases based solely on their political preferences and ideology. Justices are free to vote their personal preferences because of a set of institutional features that are not found on other courts in the United States. The implication of their argument is that justices on other courts that share these same institutional features should also be free to vote their attitudinal preferences in all cases. The focus of the paper is whether the Attitudinal Model, as explicated by Schubert (1965), and Segal and Spaeth (1993) provides a sufficient explanation of the voting behavior of judges on the Supreme Court of Canada; a court that shares all of the institutional features argued to support attitudinal voting. To test this theory, we focus on the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada between 1984 and 2002, the period since the docket of that court reflected the emergence of the new issues stimulated by the Charter of Rights. We investigate the impact of judicial attitudes using three methods: factor analysis of votes in criminal and economic cases during the most extended natural court during the Charter period, an investigation of the relationship between newspaper assessments of ideology and judicial voting in three issue areas during the entire Charter period, and an analysis of the relationship between judicial attributes used as surrogates for judicial attitudes and the career voting patterns of justices serving since the adoption of the Charter. All three methods provide independent confirmation of the view that the political preferences of the justices have a substantial impact on their voting choices [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]