Do courts make a difference? Courts and school finance reform

Political scientists disagree about the role courts can play in promoting social change. The view of courts as powerful, vigorous proponents of change and defenders of the rights of minorities against tyrannical legislative majorities has recently come under attack. Opponents of this view have rejected the idea that courts can exert a strong influence in areas about which there is political disagreement, arguing that courts only seem to influence policies and produce social change when political elites and the public have already moved in the direction of change themselves. This dissertation provides an empirical test of the hypothesis that court involvement can lead to changes in policy which would not have occurred in the absence of intervention by the court.;School finance reform provides an ideal opportunity to investigate these questions about the effectiveness of judicial policymaking. Courts in eighteen states have found the states' school financing arrangements unconstitutional and have ordered legislatures to reduce spending disparities between rich and poor school districts. By modeling school finance policy in the fifty states I am able to determine whether court involvement in school finance reform had a significant impact once the effects of other variables affecting school finance outcomes are controlled for. I use pooled time-series cross-section analysis to uncover the relationships between economic and political features of the state and school finance policy outputs. Controlling for these other factors reveals that court-ordered school finance reform produces significant changes in school finance outputs.;An analysis of reform in different states can also shed light on the conditions under which court involvement in policymaking can be effective. I use statistical analysis and a case study to test hypotheses about the conditions which contribute to the success of court involvement in school finance reform. I find that conditions associated with elite and public support for reform have a strong effect on the success of court-ordered reform. Other factors more closely related to the ruling itself, for instance whether the court took an active role in the implementation of the ruling, were found to have little measurable effect on the success of reform.