Topical Attention to Rights: Evidence from Scandinavian Supreme Courts

How and when do rights claims rise on the agendas of courts? Since rights litigation is an integral part of the judicialization of politics, measuring judicial attention to rights is essential to determining the changing role of courts in society. Existing literature has chiefly relied on measuring the annual proportion of rights cases on a court’s agenda, which is useful for describing general trends. However, the annual proportion measure limits scholar’s opportunity to fully understand how and when courts give attention to rights, since it classifies issue content in court cases dichotomously: if the primary issue in the case concern rights the case is coded as a rights case. Since court cases may consist of multiple issues and since rights are not monolithic, this paper proposes a more sophisticated way of measuring judicial attention to rights using structural topic models (STMs), a quantitative text analysis used for identifying the latent topical dimensions and assessing the effects of covariates on these dimensions. We apply STMs to a corpus of judicial decisions from Scandinavian (Norway, Denmark and Sweden) supreme courts from 1970 to 2015. Our paper makes three contributions. First, by measuring judicial attention as latent topical dimensions, our measurement approach allows us to define courts’ relative attention to different types of rights both within and between cases. Second, applying STMs allow us to determine how courts topical attention to rights vary with changes in e.g. institutional protection of legal rights and the composition of the courts. Third, we provide original knowledge about judicial attention in three understudied supreme courts.