Michael A. Catalano
How should we measure court curbing in light of the fact that judges distinguish between serious and nonserious court-curbing efforts and adjust judicial behavior accordingly? Past work on court curbing almost exclusively use counts of court-curbing bills proposed in the legislature with the implicit assumption that each court-curbing bill is equally meaningful. However, judges do distinguish between serious and nonserious attempts to court curb and alter their behavior accordingly (Mark and Zilis 2018). In this paper, I provided the theoretical foundation and measurement strategy for constructing court-curbing intensity measures meant to reflect this admission by judges about court curbing. Court-curbing intensity consists of two indicators. One determines the proportion of the judiciary among all courts of last resort, intermediate appellate courts, and general jurisdiction trial courts in a state targeted by a court-curbing bill. The second indicator focuses on the levels of the state judiciary targeted by a court-curbing bill and ascribing a cumulative score based on the different levels of courts targeted. I provide empirical tests of the usefulness of these measures compared to the simple count of court-curbing bills used in prior studies of court curbing.
