I doubt the attitudinal model could explain Garamendi, at least not in a manner that would leave it falsifiable. I.e., if I were clever enough I could probably come up with an attitudinal explanation for the Court's decision by invoking multiple dimensions or some other such tactic, but in doing so I would have to rely on the sort of post-hoc evidence that would prevent the model from being testable. No model can explain everything, and this is a fair case in point.
On the other hand, as far as I can tell this is the only case since Ginsburg joined the Court that the Court's two most liberal members joined it's two most conservative members in dissent (based on the Martin-Quinn ideology scores). Alternatively, Ginsburg and Stevens have joined Souter and Breyer in dissent 64 times, while Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas have joined either Kennedy or O'Connor in dissent 36 times (data through the end of the 2001 term). So one way of looking at this is that the ratio of attitudinally perfect or near perfect 5-4 dissents to attitudinally absurd dissents is about 100:1. Jeff Professor Jeffrey Segal Department of Political Science SUNY Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794 phone 631-632-7662 fax 631-632-4116 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunysb.edu/polsci/jsegal/ ----- Message from Earl Maltz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Tue, 24 Jun 2003 08:36:04 -0400 ----- Subject: Garamendi and the attitudinal model I'd be interested in the reaction of pure attitudinal model theorists to Garamendi.
