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Appendix A 10

Coding Procedures for Polarization Analysis 11
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n the text and notes of chapters 1 and 2 I cite several hundred decisions 14
Iissued by state or federal courts on the issues of abortion, affirmative 15
action, gay rights, and gun rights from January 1993 through August 2013. 16
For the polarization analysis presented in chapter 3, I coded all such deci- 17
sions that were issued by the Supreme Court of the United States, a federal 18
appellate court, or a state high court. These decisions are listed in appen- 19
dix B (available at http://press.uchicago.edu/0000000000000000000). 20
The list includes all decisions from chapters 1 and 2 that had close 21
legal and/or political connections to the issues noted above. For example, 22
it includes Hill v. Colorado (2000) and Doe v. Reed (2010), which were 23
formally First Amendment free speech holdings but which emerged out 24
of legal and political conflicts regarding abortion and domestic partner- 25
ships, respectively. The list excludes decisions involving unrelated issues 26
that are cited in the text simply to illustrate some general point about law 27
and courts. For example, it excludes National Federation of Independent 28
Businesses v. Sebelius (2012), in which the Supreme Court upheld most 29
provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and which is cited in chapter 2 30
to illustrate that elected officials sometimes pursue litigation when other 31
avenues of policy change are closed off. 32
For the federal appellate courts, I coded the party of the appointing 33
president for judges who participated in all decisions issued by three- 34
judge panels and most decisions issued by en banc panels. In the latter 35
category, the published opinions sometimes indicate individual judges’ 36
votes by name and, at other times, provide enough detail to allow a recon- 37
struction of individual judges’ votes; where neither of these conditions 38
holds, I left the cases uncoded. For the SCOTUS holdings, I coded the 39

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