Chad Riley

Graduation Semester and Year

2015

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

Department

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

First Advisor

M. Lewis Wasserman

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of: (1) justices' political ideology; (2) justices' religious affiliation; (3) justices' qualifications; and (4) legal precedent on voting at the United States Supreme Court in Establishment Clause decisions and other such decisions impacting K-12 education rendered between 1947 and 2014, using binary logistic regression as its main statistical tool. The principal findings for this group of K-12 decisions are:(1) Ideology as measured by party-of- the-appointing president and Segal-Cover scale measures were significant predictors of conservative voting in the Establishment Clause decisions examined;(2) Higher Segal-Cover qualification scores, indicating higher levels of qualifications, were correlated to less conservative voting;(3) U.S. Supreme Court legal precedents Zobrest v. Catalina Hills School District (1993), Agostini v. Felton (1997), and Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) did not show significance as factors in judicial voting.The results of the study support the conclusion that the attitudinal model of judicial voting behavior is an effective method for understanding how Supreme Court justices vote in Establishment Clause disputes that impact K-12 education.

Disciplines

Education | Educational Leadership

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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