The Supreme Court of Canada: Institutional effects on ideological voting

The attitudinal model of judicial behavior assumes that unique institutional features of the United States Supreme Court allow the justices to decide cases in accordance with their ideologies. These features include lack of political and electoral accountability, lack of ambition for higher office, being a court of last resort, and having control over their own docket (Segal and Spaeth 1993; 2002). However, the institutional features are only assumed to allow for attitudinal voting. In order to assess the underlying assumptions of the attitudinal model and thus, its generalizability to other courts, one's inquiry must provide variation in institutional features. Largely the institutional framework in which judges operate determines the feasibility of what they can do.;By assuming that legal and policy goals must exist for judicial actors, an approach that explores institutional change can begin to posit conditions under which legal goals predominate policy goals, and vice versa. Therefore, such an approach must take into account both variation in behavior and variation in the institutions themselves. One can begin to look outside the U.S. for variation in the institutional features of nations' high courts. Canada's Supreme Court provides a suitable test of the impact of various institutional features as they have become a court of last resort (1949), gained virtually complete docket control (1975), and gained a written constitutional bill of rights (1982) during the past half-century.;In this study, I compare the behavior of Canadian Supreme Court justices across these three periods of institutional change. If the attitudinal model is applicable to the Canadian Supreme Court, then increased ideological voting by the justices should occur over time as each institutional change occurs. Using various methodologies, I examine evidence of increased ideological voting by the justices over time.