Measuring Judicial Appeasement of the United States Supreme Court

The interpersonal dynamics of political elites remain somewhat shrouded within extant literature. In this paper, we propose a new measure of “appeasement,” using analyses of Supreme Court opinions. Appeasement operationalizes the level of strategic concession-making that individual justices display in their responses to majority opinions. Analyzing a corpus of over 9,000 non-majority opinions between 1946 and 2011, we use a machine learning model to detect the number of concessions versus non-concessions made by individual justices. This ratio of concessions to non-concessions is used to create our appeasement measure. We suggest that appeasement varies as a result of interpersonal relationships, external pressures, and personal characteristics of justices. Conciliatory speech is a tool that may be wielded by political elites in all manner of political rhetoric. As such, appeasement represents an important potential avenue for categorizing and demystifying the interpersonal dynamics of governmental institutions.