How Will They Vote? Predicting the Future Behavior of Supreme Court Nominees, 1937–2006

Abstract

Previous research suggests that the future behavior of nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court is relatively unpredictable, except for civil liberties cases. We devise a new measure of nominees' political ideology that more efficiently uses preconfirmation information about the nominees. The measure employs Segal‐Cover scores (based on content analysis of contemporary newspaper editorials) as well as DW‐NOMINATE indicators, and is scaled into the DW‐NOMINATE space. The measure predicts confirmed nominees' overall immediate, short‐term, and longer‐term voting behavior, as well as voting in issue‐specific domains, much better than do previous measures. It is particularly successful for nominees confirmed after 1957.

Polarizing the Electoral Connection: Partisan Representation in Supreme Court Confirmation Politics

“…For senators, we use DW-NOMINATE scores. For nominees, we employ the scores in Cameron and Park (2009). The authors use the past experience of each nominee (e.g., whether he or she served in Congress) to develop "nominatescaled perception scores," placing nominees on the same scale as senators.…”

The Political Ideologies of American Lawyers

“…For example, Segal and Cover (1989) have developed scores that rely on newspaper editorials and other writings at the time of nomination, pinpointing the then-candidate's (i) qualifications in tandem with their (ii) perceived ideology. These scores have been further combined with DW-NOMINATE scores and re-scaled to test additional theories of judicial behavior (Cameron & Park 2009). Additionally, new research takes voting-based ideological measurements and combines them with issue-area voting and text analysis (Bailey 2013;Lauderdale & Clark 2014).…”

From Genteel Pluralism to Hyper-Pluralism: Interest Groups and Supreme Court Nominations, 1930-2017

“…25 We note that modern presidents have paid much more attention to perceived nominee ideology when selecting nominees in the period after about 1960 (Cameron, Kastellec and Mattioli 2018). The future behavior of Supreme Court nominees confirmed after 1957 is much more predictable than those confirmed up to that point (Cameron and Park 2009). This may have contributed to the evolution of nomination politics into a recurring political campaign in the more recent era.…”

“…Our two main predictors of interest are ideological extremity and quality. The former is based on the NOMINATE-scaled Perceptions (NSP) Scores developed by Cameron and Park (2009); the scores indicate the perceived ideology of each nominee at the time of nomination, scaled into NOMINATE space. As with NOMINATE, more negative scores indicate more liberal nominees, while positive scores indicate more conservative nominees.…”