Title
The genealogy of ideology: predicting agreement and persuasive memes in the U.S. courts of appeals.
Abstract
We employ machine learning techniques to identify common characteristics and features from cases in the US courts of appeals that contribute in determining dissent. Show that our models were able to predict vote alignment with an average F1 score of 73%. Exploration into which factors help in arriving at this accuracy show that the length of the opinion, the number of citations in the opinion, and voting valence, are all key factors. These results indicate that certain high level characteristics of a case can be used to predict dissent. We also explore the influence of dissent using seating patterns of judges, and our results show that raw counts of how often two judges sit together plays a role in dissent. In addition to the dissents, we analyze the notion of memetic phrases occurring in opinions - phrases that see a small spark of popularity but eventually die out in usage - and try to correlate them to dissent.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3086512.3086544
ICAIL
Field
DocType
Citations 
Social psychology,F1 score,Political science,Voting,Ideology,Popularity,Citation network,Dissent
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
1
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shivam Verma100.34
Adithya Parthasarathy200.34
Daniel L. Chen361.20