The Conceptual Challenge to Measuring Ideology

Abstract

Abstract This chapter develops a broad, cross-national, functional definition of judicial ideology, which it uses to synthesize the leading theories of judicial decision-making into two-dimensional space. It then reviews the broad existing approaches to measuring judicial ideology—vote counting, proxy, and third party—and considers the implicit assumptions about the nature of judicial ideology that each makes, as well as their relative strengths and weaknesses in measuring ideology. In doing so, the chapter gives special attention to one barely explored method for measuring ideology: using the opinions of legal experts to derive quantitative estimates of ideology. It argues that using such expert-based evaluations can overcome many of the limitations of existing approaches. Regardless of method used, researchers using existing measures or developing new ones should consider carefully the underlying assumptions behind the measure, and in doing so, make those implicit assumptions explicit.