Mixed Signals? Rethinking How Ideology and Institutional Motivations Shape the Solicitor General’s Positions

The Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) wins more cases before the US Supreme Court than any other party. Recent scholarship shows that justices are most likely to side with the OSG when its position is ideologically aligned with justices’ predispositions and when the OSG takes a position counter its own presumed preferences. However, previous studies fail to account for how the institutional role of the OSG shapes what should be considered a counter-preference signal. We offer a new approach to defining the OSG’s preferences and test our assumptions using cases argued before the Court from 1979 to 2018. We show it is more common for the OSG to act against its ideological predispositions than its institutional interests, and it is exceedingly rare for it to act against both. We find the effects of counter-interest signals are context dependent and may be less important than ideological congruence and institutional concerns.