Illustrating Swing Votes II: United States Supreme Court

Abstract

Can we see how different the 5-4 majorities of the United States Supreme Court are? What is the number of swing votes connecting them and their relative importance? In a previous article in this journal, we developed a method for displaying the swing votes of a supreme court, the (tight) majorities they connect, and the opinions those majorities issue. We apply our method to compositions of the United States Supreme Court after 1946 that have over 50 tightly split opinions: the compositions of the court defined by its junior justice being Vinson, Stewart, Powell, Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy, Breyer, Alito, and Kagan.