Title:      Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme
Court Nominees

Authors:    Jonathan Kastellec, Jeffrey Lax, Justin Phillips

Entrydate:  2008-08-22 08:50:22

Keywords:   Supreme Court, nominations, public opinion,
multilevel models, poststratification, 

Abstract:   We study the relationship between state-level public
opinion and the roll call votes of senators on Supreme Court
nominees. Applying recent advances in multilevel modeling, we
use national polls on nine recent Supreme Court nominees to
produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the
confirmation of each nominee in all 50 states. We show that
greater public support strongly increases the probability that a
senator will vote to approve a nominee, even after controlling
for standard predictors of roll call voting. We also find that
the impact of opinion varies with context: it has a greater
effect on opposition party senators, on ideologically opposed
senators, and for generally weak nominees. These results
establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency
opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=821

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