Political Case Salience, U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments, and the Search for the Holy Grail.

For nearly fifty years judicial politics scholars have labored to define a measure of political salience for U.S. Supreme Court cases. By our conservative count, no fewer than eight distinct measures have been offered as solutions. And yet, none of these measures is able to capture what scholars truly seek: a strictly contemporary measure of political salience. In this paper we introduce the aggregate number of questions asked at oral arguments as a novel way of assessing contemporary case salience. Using data gathered from nearly 3000 oral argument transcripts that span from 1979-2005, we provide empirical diagnostics of our measure and extensive comparisons with previous measures. We also provide several applications to relevant research questions such as self-assignment by the Chief Justice, fragmented opinion coalitions, and unanimous decisions. Our theoretical arguments and empirical results demonstrate the validity of the measure. We conclude by providing initial results of a related project, which creates a question-based measure of salience defined by the number of questions asked by each individual justice at oral arguments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]