search

cis-ds / Discussion

Public discussion
10 stars 15 forks source link

hw03: vote variable #175

Closed sizhenf closed 2 years ago

sizhenf commented 3 years ago

Hi everyone,

In 4 of part 2, we are asked to identify judges' agree-ness on cases. More specifically, "determine the ten justices who most and least frequently agreed with this outcome"

In answering this questions, I thought the variable of our interest is vote in _scdbvote. However, when reading the codebook, I'm a little confused about how this variable is coded.

The vote variable takes 8 values:

1 | voted with majority or plurality 2 | dissent 3 | regular concurrence 4 | special concurrence 5 | judgment of the Court 6 | dissent from a denial or dismissal of certiorari, or dissent from summary affirmation of an appeal 7 | jurisdictional dissent 8 | justice participated in an equally divided vote

My questions are:

  1. Am I looking at the right variable here?
  2. If yes, would it be ok if I categorize (1, 3, 4) as agree and (2, 6, 7) as dissent? Then what 5 and 8? The codebook isn't super clear about their meanings..

Thanks, Serena

bensoltoff commented 3 years ago

You might be able to use that variable, but I think it would be overly confusing. Why not just use the majority column?

sizhenf commented 3 years ago

Thanks Professor Soltoff!

bensoltoff commented 3 years ago

I'll leave this open in case other students have a similar question