Explaining Federal Bureaucratic Compliance with Supreme Court Opinions

Abstract

Past research on bureaucratic compliance with Supreme Court opin ions offers few comprehensive theoretical frameworks and even fewer rigorous empirical tests. I argue that bureaucracies comply based on the costs or benefits of alternative ways of responding to the Court. Agencies develop these expectations from the environments within which they implement opinions, which I conceptualize as attributes of Court opin ions, agency characteristics, and external actors. I show that federal bu reaucracies generally comply with the Court, though they sometimes respond to the Court in self-interested ways. Using a probit model of agency implementation of Court opinions from the 1953 through 1990 terms, I also demonstrate that several factors explain whether agencies comply, including the nature of the Court's opinions, the characteristics of the responding agency, and support by societal interests. I further il lustrate that the absence of defiance or evasion most likely results from the interdependencies between federal agencies and the Court. The im plication is that legal rules are important, setting up referents for behav ior, and their ability to encourage compliance stems in part from their actual content.