Supreme policymaking: Coping with the Supreme Court's affirmative action policies.

摘要

Supreme Policymaking is a study of how the Supreme Court crafts policies and how institutions actors respond to those policies. Supreme Court decisions send both outcome and rule based signals regarding the Court's policy preferences to divergent "implementing populations" ( e.g., lower courts, legislatures, executive branches, and interest groups), and may have a measurable impact on "consumer populations" (e.g. government contractors). Harmonizing the two conventional Court impact methodologies with tools garnered from the public policy evaluation literature, I establish a policy based impact theory, and find a lack of Court impact due to the (1) impotency of many legislatively created programs, and (2) obstructionist coping mechanisms used by resistant governments.; Using regression analysis of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' local construction employment data by race in Philadelphia, Portland (Oregon), and Miami, I find that affirmative action government contracting programs are not significantly related to either (1) increasing minority employment, or (2) decreasing extant racial disparities in the construction industry. I argue that while in general the lower courts comply with the outcome signal from a court decision, coping mechanisms employed by implementing populations attempt to derail the litigation process and allow non-litigant elected branches to focus on the rule based signal from the decision. This process explains the legislative growth in affirmative action despite the hostility of the judiciary to its practice.