Measuring the Political Salience of the High Court of Australia’s Agenda, 1995-2016

How politically salient is the High Court of Australia’s agenda? How does its agenda compare with that of the US Supreme Court in this respect? This paper answers these questions through an original analysis of the High Court’s agenda. Employing the measure of salience developed by Clark, et al. (2015), it analyzes all stories that appeared in The Australian newspaper between 1995 and 2016, determining which cases were discussed and where those cases were in terms of their “lifecycles” before the Court at the time of their newspaper coverage. The paper captures two dimensions of salience. First, it accounts for cumulative coverage of each case as it proceeds through the High Court’s decision-making process, and second, the paper accounts for the location of each article in the newspaper. This project constitutes the first effort to apply this more thorough measure of political salience beyond the US. It compares its original findings with those of Clark, et al. concerning the US Supreme Court. The paper’s findings also offer insights into the debate over the extent to which the High Court has become more politicized over the last 25 years. Tom S. Clark, Jeffrey R. Lax, and Douglas Rice, “Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases,” 3(1) Journal of Law and Courts (Spring 2015), pp. 37-65.