Citation

Caldeira GA. Soc. Netw. 1988; 10(1): 29-55.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1988, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/0378-8733(88)90009-3

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In making and justifying choices, state supreme courts rely on many sources of authority, including the precedents of other courts. To the extent that appellate judges borrow, reject, and review each other's decisions, the several state supreme courts from a network for the communication of political information. In this paper I focus on identifying, describing, and explaining the bases of discrete networks among the state supreme courts. More specifically, using all interstate references for all states and the District of Columbia in the calendar year 1975, I rely on clustering techniques to uncover coherent and consistent "networks," and discriminant analysis to ferret out the essential bases of the groupings of state supreme courts. Do interpretable blocks of state supreme courts emerge? If so, what binds these sets of appellate courts? Do constellations of leaders and followers develop? Do networks go beyond particular regions?