Methodological study demonstrates ideological preference estimation for Israeli High Court judges using manifesto coding, highlighting how judicial review reflects latent political stances.
In political systems where political parties are not the sole veto player on judicial nominations, the judicial selection process obfuscates judges' political preferences. However, activists, politicians, pundits, public opinion, and scholars try to assess these preferences because they are crucial for understanding the interaction between judges and political elites. We present a method for inferring judges' political ideology without prior knowledge of their political affiliations. The method we suggest uses the Manifesto Research Group on Political Representation's (MARPOR) coding scheme to assess judges' decisions within their political ideology contexts. We claim that this contextualization accounts for variance in judicial review patterns and associates the judges' reviews with their ideological positions. We apply our method to the Israeli High Court of Justice's judges' decisions and use our data to discuss some public quandaries regarding the court.
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Rosenthal et al. (2022) studied this question.
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