Did Bloggers Kill the Health Care Mandate? - The Atlantic

Did Bloggers Kill the Health Care Mandate? - The Atlantic (see link for complete article)

Studies Have Shown...
The arc of the academic literature about public opinion and Supreme Court outcomes is long, but it bends, unlike most academic literatures, towards an actual conclusion. Taken as a whole, studies suggest that context matters, and that political atmosphere affects decisions over time.

The studies take one of two basic approaches. The first focuses on elite opinion and smacks of social psychology. According to Kevin McGuire, political science professor at UNC, this school of thought says that judges, like members of any subculture, care about what people like themselves think.

McGuire pointed to one study that compared Democratic and Republican appointees who were living in Washington with those who came to Washington from outside the Beltway. Among the four different categories (Republican/Democrat, Living in Washington/Living outside Washington), only Republican appointees from outside Washington, suddenly immersed in the liberal elite legal social circles, showed a "marked tendency" towards ideological drift: Whether at the middle-school lunch table or at Katherine Graham's dinner table, people conform to their peers. (McGuire suggests this phenomenon may be in decline, though, due to the 30-year rise of elite conservative legal culture through organizations like the Federalist Society.)