Using Wordfish to compare ideology of Supreme Court Opinions: Free Exercise v. Commerical Speech

“I retrieved the majority opinons of 31 Supreme Court opinions conerning the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and 25 opinions conerning Commerical Speech protected under the Free Speech CLause of the First Amendment. However, I went to Westlaw to retrieve the entire majority text of the opinion. I cleaned the corpus by removing stopwords, moving to lowercase, and removing numbers. I then ran the Wordfish model and plotted the results From my initial results it seems as though the model has appropiately assinged the cases on the plot based on the two cases I assinged the model. Interestingly enough, it seems as though the ideological distrubitio of cases for both free exercise and commerical speech cases are similar. I am curious how I would compare the two?”

Justin Burnworth
2022-04-12

“Free Speech: Commercial Speech Cases”


Call:
textmodel_wordfish.dfm(x = dfm, dir = c(11, 21))

Estimated Document Positions:
          theta       se
text1   0.84896 0.017764
text2  -0.89121 0.126546
text3  -1.23075 0.015217
text4   0.64901 0.028536
text5   0.65960 0.035665
text6   0.47977 0.038070
text7   0.68629 0.028502
text8   0.66787 0.027457
text9  -1.52053 0.009602
text10 -0.47691 0.038419
text11 -1.31607 0.014791
text12  1.21425 0.009299
text13 -1.45611 0.010870
text14  0.81427 0.028128
text15 -0.75121 0.043028
text16  0.86864 0.018279
text17 -0.95904 0.026201
text18  0.90843 0.024401
text19  1.26121 0.008808
text20  1.05459 0.016610
text21 -1.01949 0.017708
text22 -0.45255 0.030270
text23 -1.29263 0.017822
text24  1.32324 0.007040
text25 -0.06963 0.034052

Estimated Feature Scores:
     justice stevens announced judgment   court delivered opinion
beta  0.3358 -0.1345  -0.03187 -0.04828 -0.1327 -0.005779 0.03844
psi   0.6044 -0.2259  -1.29114  1.34103  2.9842 -0.078519 1.16126
     respect   parts       ii    vii     viii      iii kennedy
beta  0.6687  0.2846 -0.12021  1.229 -0.09057  0.40395  0.2563
psi   0.1168 -1.2556  0.07189 -2.948 -2.26559 -0.03706 -1.0445
      souter ginsburg   join     part      vi  thomas      iv    last
beta  0.8507  0.06611 -0.563 -0.08504  0.4122 -0.1524  0.3381  0.5325
psi  -2.1526 -1.77822 -1.477  0.93939 -1.7149 -0.5881 -0.6409 -0.8586
         term    held federal     law abridging  brewer   right
beta  0.08726 -0.2257  0.3313 -0.7384    0.1247  0.9923 -0.5353
psi  -0.25687  1.1610  1.0505  1.6235   -1.6098 -3.8630  0.8199
       provide
beta -0.337749
psi  -0.002997

“Free Exercise Cases”


Call:
textmodel_wordfish.dfm(x = dfm, dir = c(1, 5))

Estimated Document Positions:
          theta       se
text1   0.58779 0.031776
text2   0.67741 0.039646
text3   1.34556 0.006792
text4  -1.32332 0.019616
text5   1.06455 0.015741
text6   0.67148 0.022375
text7   0.54136 0.031743
text8  -0.97100 0.026680
text9   0.06685 0.059962
text10  0.65651 0.030174
text11  1.12440 0.021015
text12  0.80382 0.041215
text13  1.24716 0.013502
text14  0.17292 0.044106
text15  0.35052 0.054988
text16  1.50455 0.005961
text17 -1.64800 0.014077
text18  0.91945 0.020906
text19 -1.69531 0.016623
text20 -0.95800 0.042310
text21  0.19203 0.033410
text22 -0.61344 0.032420
text23 -0.89839 0.046771
text24 -1.62746 0.013527
text25 -1.92601 0.006043
text26  0.38887 0.048870
text27  0.09481 0.037017
text28 -0.70314 0.036166
text29  0.59748 0.033967
text30 -0.73765 0.026760
text31  0.09417 0.047915

Estimated Feature Scores:
      ounced judgment   court delivered opinion respect  parts
beta  0.6302  -0.1462 -0.1714  -0.05565 0.09533 0.07365 -0.290
psi  -3.7027   1.1512  3.1327  -0.09645 1.51721 0.38107 -1.494
          ii    part      iii  justice  powell rehnquist    join
beta -0.2264 -0.1114  0.01792 -0.02415  0.3666    0.5261 -0.2372
psi   0.2052  1.1090 -0.35063  0.98184 -1.9807   -1.8606 -1.9492
     question presented whether     free exercise  clause   first
beta  -0.1351   -0.2574  -0.102 -0.02738    0.277 0.07306 -0.2694
psi    1.2236   -0.1299   1.813  2.51826    2.651 1.94136  2.3597
     amendment compels government accommodate religiously   based
beta   -0.0666 -0.1034     0.4133      0.7755    -0.03323 -0.3477
psi     2.2919 -1.5886     2.3098     -1.7049    -0.06359  0.9290
     objection statutory requirements
beta  0.119378    0.9989       0.1855
psi  -0.008695   -0.2435       0.4068