Replication Data for: The Decisions and Ideal Points of British Law Lords.

Policy-sensitive models of judicial behaviour, whether attitudinal or strategic, have largely passed Britain by. This article argues that this neglect has been benign, because explanations of judicial decisions in terms of the positions of individual judges fare poorly in the British case. To support this argument, the non-unanimous opinions of British Law Lords between 1969 and 2009 are analysed. A hierarchical item-response model of individual judges’ votes is estimated in order to identify judges’ locations along a one-dimensional policy space. Such a model is found to be no better than a null model that predicts that every judge will vote with the majority with the same probability. Locations generated by the model do not represent judges’ political attitudes, only their propensity to dissent. Consequently, judges’ individual votes should not be used to describe them in political terms.

无论是态度导向型还是策略导向型的司法行为政策敏感模型，在英国的相关研究中基本未受重视。本文认为，此种忽视实则无伤大雅，因为以个体法官的立场来解释司法判决的研究路径，在英国语境下效果欠佳。为佐证这一论点，本文对1969年至2009年间英国上议院司法议员（Law Lords）作出的非一致裁决意见书展开了量化分析。本文构建了针对个体法官投票行为的分层项目反应模型（hierarchical item-response model），旨在识别法官在单一维度政策空间中的立场定位。研究结果显示，该模型的预测性能并不优于基准零模型（null model）——后者预设所有法官均以相同概率附和多数意见。该模型所生成的法官立场定位，并非其政治态度的体现，仅能反映其异议倾向。因此，不应借助个体法官的投票行为，以政治话语对其进行定性描述。