Intuitive Lawmaking II: The Relationship between Citizens' Endorsement of Principles and Their Resolution of Cases

Abstract

Citizens awaiting jury service were asked a series of items, in Likert format, to determine their endorsement of various principles that might be called upon to explain legal judgments about the appropriate amount of child support to require in individual cases. These items were derived from extant systems, from past literature and from Ellman and Ellman's (2008) Theory of Child Support. These items were found to coalesce into four factors, three of which corresponded roughly with the principles that Theory endorsed. There were pervasive gender differences in respondent's endorsement of these four basic principles. Three of the four principles abstracted from the item responses were systematically reflected in the respondents' resolution of individual child support cases they were asked to decide. Differences among respondents in their endorsement of these three basic principles explained much of the variance among them in their child support judgments. It is suggested that the pattern of coherent arbitrariness (Ariely, Loewenstein and Prelec 2003) in those support judgments, noted in an earlier study (Ellman, Braver, and MacCoun 2009) is thus partially explained, in that the seeming arbitrariness of respondents' initial support judgments reflect in part their differing views about the basic principles that should decide the cases.

Keywords: child support, tradeoffs, incommensurability, coherent arbitrariness, lawmaking

JEL Classification: D63, J12, K10, K39