About

Gregory A. Caldeira is a Distinguished University Professor and the Dreher Chair in Political Communication and Policy Thinking at The Ohio State University. He specializes in research and teaching within the fields of law and courts and American political institutions. His scholarly work has been published in various reputable journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and others, and his book Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations was published by Princeton in 2009. Caldeira has served as an Associate Editor of the American Political Science Review and was the Editor of the American Journal of Political Science from 1998 to 2001. He has held numerous editorial and leadership roles within major political science associations, including the American Political Science Association and the Midwest Political Science Association. His research projects include studies on the public response to Supreme Court decisions, the formation of the Court's agenda, public opinion and Court-packing, the New Deal and the Supreme Court, and newspaper endorsements in presidential elections. He has received the Ohio State Distinguished Scholar Award and was named Distinguished University Professor in 1999.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Mathematics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Law
• Public administration
• Demographic economics
• Operations research
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Economics
• Physics

Selected publications

• In Memoriam: Randall Butler Ripley

  Political Science Today · 2022

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Mathematics

  An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Measuring Policy Content on the U.S. Supreme Court

  Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2021-10-30

  articleOpen access

  Political scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of the influences on Supreme Court decision making. Yet, much less attention has been paid to empirical measures of the Court’s ideological output. We develop a theory of the interactions between rational litigants, lower court judges, and Supreme Court justices. We argue that the most common measure of the Supreme Court’s ideological output—whether the Court’s decision is liberal or conservative—suffers from systematic bias. We trace this bias empirically and explain the undesirable consequences it has for empirical analyses of judicial behavior. Specifically, we show that, although the Court’s preferences are positively correlated with the ideological direction of the justices’ decision to reverse a lower court, the attitudes of the justices are negatively related—and significantly so—to the ideological direction of outcomes that affirm lower court decisions. We also offer a solution that allows scholars to work around this ‘‘affirmance bias.’’

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Congress and Community: Coresidence and Social Influence in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1801–1861

  American Political Science Review · 2021 · 23 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Social psychology

  Legislators often rely on cues from colleagues to inform their actions. Several studies identify the boardinghouse effect , cue-taking among U.S. legislators who lived together in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, there remains reason for skepticism, as legislators likely selected residences for reasons including political similarity. We analyze U.S. House members’ residences from 1801 to 1861, decades more than previously studied, and show not only that legislators tended to live with similar colleagues but also that coresidents with divergent politics were more likely to move apart. Therefore, we deploy improved identification strategies. First, using weighting, we estimate that coresidence increased voting agreement, but at only half of previously reported levels. Consistent with theoretical expectations, we find larger effects for weaker ties and those involving new members. Second, we study legislators who died in office, estimating that deaths increased ideological distance between survivors and deceased coresidents.

  PublisherDOI

• Justice-level heterogeneity in certiorari voting: US Supreme Court October terms 1939, 1968, and 1982

  Political Science Research and Methods · 2021-12-17 · 2 citations

  article1st author

  Abstract Although the literature on US Supreme Court agenda-setting is sizable, justice-vote-level multivariate analyses of certiorari are almost exclusively limited to samples of discussed cases from 1986 to 1993. Moreover, these studies have done very little to explore justice-level heterogeneity on certiorari. Here, we address these lacunae by analyzing the predictors of individual justices’ cert votes on all paid cases from the 1939, 1968, and 1982 terms. We find substantial justice-level heterogeneity in the weight that justices place on the standard set of forces shaping the cert vote. We also show that some of this heterogeneity is associated with justices’ experience and ideological extremism, largely in theoretically predicted ways. In closing, we sound a note of caution on drawing conclusions about effects of justice attributes, when the number of justices is relatively small.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Selection of Cases for Discussion

  Harvard Dataverse · 2021-01-02

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication files for Selection of Cases JLC article. 8 files total. See Readme file.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Justice-Level Heterogeneity in Certiorari Voting: U.S. Supreme Court October Terms 1939, 1968, and 1982

  Harvard Dataverse · 2021-10-16

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Although the literature on U.S. Supreme Court agenda-setting is sizable, justice-vote-level multivariate analyses of certiorari are almost exclusively limited to samples of discussed cases from 1986--1993. Moreover, these studies have done very little to explore justice-level heterogeneity on certiorari. Here, we address these lacunae by analyzing the predictors of individual justices' cert votes on all paid cases from the 1939, 1968, and 1982 terms. We find substantial justice-level heterogeneity in the weight that justices place on the standard set of forces shaping the cert vote. We also show that some of this heterogeneity is associated with justices' experience and ideological extremism, largely in theoretically predicted ways. In closing, we sound a note of caution on drawing conclusions about effects of justice attributes, when the number of justices is relatively small.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Congress and Community: Coresidence and Social Influence in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1801–1861

  Harvard Dataverse · 2021-06-14

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Legislators often rely on cues from colleagues to inform their actions. Several studies identify the boardinghouse effect, cue-taking among U.S. legislators who lived together in the 19th century. Nevertheless, there remains reason for skepticism, since legislators likely selected residences for reasons including political similarity. We analyze U.S. House members’ residences from 1801 to 1861, decades more than previously studied, and show not only that legislators tended to live with similar colleagues, but also that coresidents with divergent politics were more likely to move apart. We therefore deploy improved identification strategies. First, using weighting, we estimate that coresidence increased voting agreement, but at only half of previously reported levels. Consistent with theoretical expectations, we find larger effects for weaker ties and those involving new members. Second, we study legislators who died in office, estimating that deaths increased ideological distance between survivors and deceased coresidents.

  PublisherDOI

• Selection of Cases for Discussion

  Journal of Law and Courts · 2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  Abstract The first, hidden stage of the Supreme Court’s agenda-setting process is the formation of the “discuss list,” the small set of cases actually considered in conference. Yet few have systematically considered the operation of and the influences on this critical initial phase of decision making. No systematic, empirical work makes comparisons over time of how features of cases shape the makeup of the chief justice’s discuss list. Here, we examine the composition of the discuss list through a multivariate analysis of all paid petitions for certiorari filed in October Term 1939, 1968, and 1982. We are thereby able to compare the tendencies and efficacy of three long-serving chief justices—Hughes, Warren, and Burger—in making up the discuss list. And, methodologically, we present an alternative to the “observed-value” and the “representative-case” methods of calculating effect sizes for second differences, with software to implement our proposal.

  PublisherDOI

• Socializing Statecraft: Wining and Dining Congress in the Jefferson Presidency

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2016-06-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  Publisher

• Overview of Law and Politics the Study of Law and Politics

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2013-09-05 · 2 citations

  bookSenior author

  Abstract This book deals with the interdisciplinary connections of the study of law and politics. It discusses jurisprudence and the philosophy of law, constitutional law, politics and theory, judicial politics, and law and society. The book reviews three prominent traditions in the empirical analysis of law and politics and, indeed, politics more broadly: judicial behavior, strategic action, and historical institutionalism. It also focuses on questions of law and courts in a global context and on how law constitutes and orders political and social relationships. Moreover, the book: examines how courts, politics, and society have intersected in the United States; reviews several recent interdisciplinary movements in the study of law and politics and how they intersect with and are of interest to political science; and offers personal perspectives on how the study of law and politics has developed over the past generation, and where it might be headed in the next.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James L. Gibson

  Stellenbosch University

  32 shared

• John P. Pelissero

  20 shared

• Melinda Hall

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  16 shared

• Suny-Stony Brook

  University of Missouri–St. Louis

  16 shared

• Nancy H. Zingale

  Georgetown University

  16 shared

• Jeffrey A. Segal

  Stony Brook University

  16 shared

• Allan J. Cigler

  Thiel College

  16 shared

• Lana Stein

  16 shared

Awards & honors

• Ohio State's Distinguished Scholar Award (1993)
• Named Distinguished University Professor (1999)