No Self-Control: Decentralized Agenda Power and the Dimensional Structure of the Mexican Supreme Court

We investigate the dimensionality of Mexico's Supreme Court by analyzing individual justice behavior in judicial review petitions heard between 1995 and 2007. We specify a dynamic, two-dimensional item response model to estimate ideal points and their temporal drift from all contested votes recorded in the period. We find ideal points scattered in all four quadrants of space at least some of the time in the period. Higher-dimensionality is expected in a Court with decentralized agenda power, like Mexico's. Analysis also reveals drastic realignments in justices' ideal points in the period. If the policy cleavage dominated at the start, judicial doctrine became preponderant towards the end, with a mix of both dimensions in between.

Keywords: Agenda power, docket control, spatial model, legal doctrine, Mexican Supreme Court

JEL Classification: D71, D72, K10, K49

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Magar, Eric and Magaloni, Beatriz and Sanchez, Arianna, No Self-Control: Decentralized Agenda Power and the Dimensional Structure of the Mexican Supreme Court (2010). APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1642431