Contemporary US Supreme Court nominations are unavoidably and inevitably political. Although observers worry that political contestation over nominations undermines support for qualified nominees and threatens the Court's legitimacy, there is little empirical evidence to support these claims. The authors argue that political contestation over judicial nominations provides cues that shape the public's impressions about nominees and the Court and polarizes public opinion across partisan lines. Data from a conjoint experiment administered in the first days of the Trump presidency support this argument. Political rhetoric attributed to President Trump and Senate Democrats substantially polarized partisans’ views of nominees and evaluations of the Court's legitimacy, with Republicans (Democrats) expressing significantly more (less) favorable attitudes. Additional analyses suggest that contestation generates divergent partisan responses by affecting views about the nominee's impartiality. These findings challenge existing perspectives that depict attitudes toward the judiciary as resistant to partisan considerations and have important implications for the Court's legitimacy in a polarized era.

Recent scholarship shows relatively low public approval for the president's use of unilateral powers, yet public attitudes are often susceptible to framing effects. We conduct a series of survey experiments to explore attitudes toward unilateral power while varying a range of contextual features, including the identity of the president, the unilateral tool used, the justification for the action, and the policy pursued. We find little evidence that context affects attitudes toward unilateral powers except in circumstances that invoke explicitly political factors. Our findings have important implications for understanding how public opinion responds to presidential power.

Though the demographic characteristics of judicial nominees in the United States have gained increased political attention in recent years, relatively little is known about how they affect public opinion toward judicial nominees and courts. We evaluate these relationships in the context of race and gender using a conjoint experiment conducted during a recent vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. We find consistent evidence that Americans are more supportive of coracial nominees, particularly among white Republicans and Black Democrats, but no evidence of a similar effect on the basis of gender. Our results have important implications for theories of descriptive representation and suggest limits to its use as a means for generating political support for judicial nominees.

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