It is commonly assumed that Supreme Court justices' votes largely reflect their attitudes, values, or personal policy preferences. Nevertheless, this assumption has never been adequately tested with independent measures of the ideological values of justices, that is, measures not taken from their votes on the Court. Using content analytic techniques, we derive independent and reliable measures of the values of all Supreme Court justices from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy. These values correlate highly with the votes of the justices, providing strong support for the attitudinal model.

We develop and test a neoinstitutional model of Senate roll call voting on nominees to the Supreme Court. The statistical model assumes that Senators examine the characteristics of nominees and use their roll call votes to establish an electorally attractive position on the nominees. The model is tested with probit estimates on the 2,054 confirmation votes from Earl Warren to Anthony Kennedy. The model performs remarkably well in predicting the individual votes of Senators to confirm or reject nominees. Senators routinely vote to confirm nominees who are perceived as well qualified and ideologically proximate to Senators' constituents. When nominees are less well qualified and are relatively distant, however, Senators' votes depend to a large degree on the political environment, especially the status of the president.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.We test a spatial model of Supreme Court confirmation votes that examines the effects of (1) the ideological distance between senators' constituents and nominees, (2) the personal ideologies of senators, (3) the qualifications of the nominee, (4) the strength of the president, and (5) the mobilization for and against nominees by interest groups. The data consist of the 1,475 individual confirmation votes from the 1955 nomination of John Harlan until the 1987-88 nomination of Anthony Kennedy (voice votes excluded). All of the above factors significantly affect confirmation voting. The model explains 78% of the variance in senators' decisions, predicts 92% of the individual votes correctly, and predicts all of the aggregate outcomes correctly. IntroductionThis paper examines a spatial model of roll call voting on Supreme Court nominations from John Harlan (1955) to Anthony Kennedy (1988). We approach roll call voting from much the same perspective as proponents of the new institutionalism who have adapted the spatial theory of voting to the roll call setting (Krehbiel and Rivers 1988). We explain below why we believe this approach is particularly promising. But we address the questions raised in recent roll call studies and the literature on representation in legislatures more broadly by considering the impact of constituent desires, interest group pressures, presidential power, and the personal ideologies of legislators on roll call votes. We focus on voting on Supreme Court nominees, which supplies a tractable setting for examining these questions. The model builds on our previous work (Cameron, Cover, and Segal 1990), in which constituency ideology is measured inferentially using scores developed by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Our new model represents an This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 15:21:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms A SPATIAL MODEL OF ROLL CALL VOTING 97effort to measure constituency influence more directly and to purge the ADA scores of senators' personal ideologies. In this model selected state-level presidential election results are used to measure constituency ideology. We then add an explicit measure of the effect of senators' personal ideologies in addition to the purified constituency measure of the previous model. This model further extends our original work by offering a more complete specification of how the president affects the confirmation process and by incorporating interest group activity into the model as a factor that influences senators' votes. Ideology, Constituents, and Roll Call VotingWithout slighting other approaches, we start our examination of roll call voting with those studies t...

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