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

Kastellec, Jonathan P.; Lax, Jeffrey R.; Malecki, Michael; Phillips, Justin

doi:10.1086/681261

Cited by 68 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…However, this responsiveness is limited in ways that reinforce polarization and inequality. Lawmakers are more likely to change their behavior after shifts in attention by party supporters, as previous work leads us to expect (Bawn et al 2012;Clinton 2006;Egan 2013;Kastellec et al 2015;Shapiro et al 1990). To a lesser extent, politicians are also responsive to the issue priorities of attentive citizens over those less inclined to follow politics (Aldrich 1995;Arnold 1990).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Our manuscript focuses on the first of these two questions, because while a correspondence between public and political agendas has definitively been shown to exist, there is still high uncertainty about who leads and who follows in the agenda-setting process. Evidence is even more scant on the important question of which citizens have the strongest ability to set political agendas: the general public (Downs 1957), attentive citizens (Aldrich 1995;Arnold 1990), or politicians' own supporters (Egan 2013;Kastellec et al 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data

et al. 2019

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Are legislators responsive to the priorities of the public? Research demonstrates a strong correspondence between the issues about which the public cares and the issues addressed by politicians, but conclusive evidence about who leads whom in setting the political agenda has yet to be uncovered. We answer this question with fine-grained temporal analyses of Twitter messages by legislators and the public during the 113th US Congress. After employing an unsupervised method that classifies tweets sent by legislators and citizens into topics, we use vector autoregression models to explore whose priorities more strongly predict the relationship between citizens and politicians. We find that legislators are more likely to follow, than to lead, discussion of public issues, results that hold even after controlling for the agenda-setting effects of the media. We also find, however, that legislators are more likely to be responsive to their supporters than to the general public.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data

et al. 2019

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“…Scholarship suggests that partisanship and ideology strongly predict environmental opinion (Dunlap et al ; McCright ; Gromet et al ). Thus, we rely on the two‐stage MRP method developed by Kastellec et al () to separately estimate opinion among Democrats, Republicans, and independents. More generally for the MRP analysis, we include six gender‐race categories, four age categories, four educational categories, and a trichotomous indicator of the respondent's partisanship (Democratic, Republican, or independent).…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Judicial Elections, Public Opinion, and Decisions on Lower‐Salience Issues

Canes‐Wrone¹,

Clark²,

Semet³

2018

J Empirical Legal Studies

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Scholarship finds that in states with judicial elections, public opinion affects judges’ decisions on hot‐button campaign issues such as the death penalty or marijuana legalization. Yet the literature leaves open the question of how public opinion affects judicial decisions on less salient issues, which not only dominate the dockets of state supreme courts but also encompass areas of major legal and policy significance. We consider one such issue that infrequently emerges in judicial campaigns, environmental law. Specifically, we collect an original dataset of over 5,000 judicial votes on nearly 1,000 cases heard in 40 state supreme courts from 1990–2014. We find that for the dataset as a whole, there is not a significant effect of public opinion on judicial decisions in any of the major judicial selection systems. However, in the few states in which environmental issues have been the subject of campaign attack ads, we find evidence of such a relationship during the years following the ads. These results contribute to a growing literature that suggests elections can reduce judicial independence from public opinion.

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“…Unfortunately, however, the GSS survey is not representative at the state level. Therefore, we follow Kastellec, Lax, Malecki, and Phillips () who build on the “multilevel regression and poststratification” (MRP) technique to estimate the share of individuals with pro‐environment attitudes among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans for each state and for each year. As the GSS was not conducted in some years, we take the average of the estimation from the preceding and the following year for the missing years.…”

Section: A Regression Discontinuity Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Polarization of American Environmental Policy: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Senate and House Votes, 1971–2013

Kim

Urpelainen

2017

Review of Policy Research

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The partisan polarization of environmental policy is an important development in American politics, but it remains unclear how much such polarization reflects voter preferences, as opposed to disagreements between partisan elites. We conduct a regression discontinuity analysis of all major environmental and energy votes in the Senate and the House, 1971-2013. In total, we have 368,974 individual roll call votes by senators and House Representatives. The causal effect of electing a Democrat instead of a Republican in close elections on pro-environmental voting is large: when a Democrat wins, pro-environmental voting increases by over 40 percentage points. Because of the quasi-experimental research design, this difference cannot be attributed to the median voter's preferences. Next, we test hypotheses concerning possible explanations for the elite partisan conflict. The Democrat-Republican gap is the widest when fossil fuel interests make contributions exclusively to Republicans and when state-level public opinion is polarized.

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

Cited by 68 publications

References 26 publications

Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data

Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data

Judicial Elections, Public Opinion, and Decisions on Lower‐Salience Issues

The Polarization of American Environmental Policy: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Senate and House Votes, 1971–2013

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