Sandra Day O'Connor: Moderate or Something More?

In 2006 an historic era of the Supreme Court came to a close with the retirement of its first female justice, Sandra Day O'Connor. This paper attempts to expand judicial behavior scholarship by examining O'Connor's policy preferences for possible ideological change during her twenty-five year tenure on the Court. Average liberalism scores for her overall and civil rights/civil liberties issue area votes show an increase in liberalism over time. The researcher employs time series cross section analysis with panel corrected standard errors to determine factors responsible for this increase. Issue change, interagreement with the other justices, changes in Court membership, ideological mood of the country, and political polarization account for the lion's share of the increase. Contrary to the prevailing attitudinal model, change of preference does occur; however, the issue of separating true preference change from other salient influences in a statistical model remains unresolved.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Political Science

Year

2007

Author dc:creator

• Arceneaux, Patricia

Contributors dc:contributor

• Chervenak, Edward; Rosenblum, Marc
• Day, Christine

• Sandra Day OConnor
• judicial behavior
• policy preference
• ideological change
• attitudinal model

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/622

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:td-1622