Time Binding and Theory Building in Personal Attribute Models of Supreme Court Voting Behavior, 1916-88

We discuss the circumstances under which analysts may expect statistical models to be time and content bound and suggest that conclusions that personal attributes models are powerful only for the postwar U.S. Supreme Court justices are premature. We present a personal attributes theory of liberalism in the U.S. Supreme Court for the past seven decades that includes political, social cleavage, family origins, and career socialization variables. We apply it to the behavior of the 46 justices serving from 1916 through 1988 (i.e., through Anthony Kennedy). Our theory-based models provide appealing and statistically robust explanations of the justices' behavior across the 72 years.