Measuring Policy Change in the Rehnquist Court

Abstract

Measurement of policy change is complicated by change in the content of the issues that policymakers face. The author presented a method to control for issue change in decisions of the Supreme Court and used that method to measure change in civil liberties policy from 1946 to 1986. This article uses the same method to measure policy change in the early Rehnquist Court (1986-1993). The analysis indicates that the early Rehnquist Court was less favorable to civil liberties than its record of pro- and anti-civil liberties decisions indicates, because it increasingly accepted cases in which pro-civil liberties votes were relatively "easy" to cast. The results underline the need to take issue change into account in analyzing policy change.