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Reinvigorating Regime Politics, Christopher Shortell

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper seeks to reinvigorate the theory of regime politics in the judiciary among legal scholars, taking into account the critiques offered. The paper reviews the extant literature on regime politics, including its origins, before examining the criticisms this approach engendered. The valid concerns highlight the limited development of regime politics as a theory, despite the empirical work conducted in this tradition. This paper aims to address that shortcoming, explicitly identifying the underlying assumptions of regime politics theory and then developing testable hypotheses based on those assumptions.