U.S. Supreme Court ideological score 1937-2021

Published by Statista Research Department, Nov 21, 2023
A 2022 analysis of the Supreme Court found that the court reached a conservative ideological peak in 1988. During the 1988 Supreme Court term, Justices Brennan, White, Marshall, Blackmun, Rehnquist, Stevens, O'Connor, Scalia, and Kennedy presided over the bench. The court was at its most liberal in 1963.

Ideological scores of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1937 to 2021

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Release date

October 2022

Region

United States

Survey time period

1937 to 2021

Supplementary notes

*Indicates a term in which a justice resigned and their replacement was confirmed and seated during a term. This happened in the 1937 term (Stanley Forman Reed replaced George Sutherland), 1938 term (William O. Douglas replaced Louis Brandeis), 1956 term (Charles Evans Whittaker replaced Stanley Forman Reed), and the 2005 term (Samuel Alito replaced Sandra Day O'Connor).

Martin-Quinn scores, or MQ scores, are dynamic metrics used to gauge the ideology of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice based on their voting record. A jurist's score will continuously change as each judicial decision they make creates a new data point to be input into the model. MQ scores theoretically have no minimum or maximum values, but scores generally fall between -5 and 5. A negative number indicates a tendency towards liberalism, while a positive score indicates a tendency towards conservatism.

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