Questioning Justice: U.S. Supreme Court Salience and Polarization Data

Jonah Simon developed this replication dataset for a government senior thesis investigating salience-conditioned polarization within the U.S. Supreme Court. The collection supports academic analysis of judicial behavior and was last updated in March 2026. It provides the empirical basis for studying how the importance of a case influences ideological voting patterns.

Use Cases

• Replicating the thesis findings on salience-conditioned polarization
• Modeling Supreme Court voting patterns based on case salience features
• Analyzing ideological shifts in judicial behavior across different Supreme Court decisions

Strengths

• Provides specific replication data for a government senior thesis
• Focuses on the relationship between case salience and judicial polarization
• Sourced from a dedicated academic study on U.S. Supreme Court behavior

Limitations

• Metadata does not specify row counts or column headers
• Limited to the scope of a single undergraduate or graduate thesis
• Geographically restricted to the United States federal judiciary

Provenance

Source

Jonah Simon, Dataverse

Freshness

Last updated March 2026.

Geography

United States