Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings in the U.S. Senate

Farganis, Dion; Wedeking, Justin

doi:10.3998/mpub.5918574

Cited by 19 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Thus, we argue that any data that can be brought to bear on such questions is helpful, especially when describing causal mechanisms. While we cannot say with certainty that the public will respond similarly to future vacancies, we nevertheless suspect the mechanism we uncover will be useful for vacancies to come given the increasingly contentious and politicized nature of these events (Cameron et al, 2013;Farganis & Wedeking, 2014).…”

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confidence: 86%

“…Winners, Losers, and Public Support for the Judiciary While once a routine political affair, nominations to the Supreme Court are now fairly contentiousness events (Cameron et al, 2013;Farganis & Wedeking, 2014). Nominee-senator ideological proximity has supplanted nominee qualification as the predominant predictor of a senator's "yea" vote (Epstein et al, 2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Politicized Battles: How Vacancies and Partisanship Influence Support for the Supreme Court

Armaly

Lane

2022

American Politics Research

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Supreme Court vacancies are now characterized by great partisan efforts to confirm—or impede—the nomination. Amid a politicized vacancy before the 2020 election, there was cause to question the conclusion that these vacancies do not harm the judiciary in the public’s eyes. We utilize panel data collected before and after Justice Ginsburg’s death to investigate the effects of the vacancy and partisan posturing to fill it. We find that the battle over the vacancy yielded decreases in diffuse support among Democrats, particularly among those who read a story about Senate Republicans’ willingness to fill an election-year vacancy after refusing to in 2016. Support for federal judicial elections decreased across survey waves, but only among certain subsets of respondents. Finally, belief that one’s preferred 2020 candidate would nominate the next justice significantly influenced support for curbing. Elected branch politics appear capable of influencing the mass public’s level of support for the Court.

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confidence: 86%

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confidence: 99%

Politicized Battles: How Vacancies and Partisanship Influence Support for the Supreme Court

Armaly

Lane

2022

American Politics Research

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“…The most recent nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson certainly followed the same pattern. Many lament the Senate nomination proceedings’ shift to a hyper focus on ideology and judicial philosophy and away from qualifications and judicial ethics (Cameron et al, 2013; Farganis & Wedeking, 2014; Silverstein, 2007; Ogundele & Keith, 1999). Poetically, the first nominee to replace Antonin Scalia after his passing, Merrick Garland, waited 293 days for a confirmation hearing before the nomination expired and a new resident took office (Elving, 2018).…”

Section: The Evolving Politics Of Judicial Nominationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Going Nuclear: Federalist Society Affiliated Judicial Nominees’ Prospects and a New Era of Confirmation Politics¹

Bird

McGee

2022

American Politics Research

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Significant changes to the federal judicial confirmation process have manifested over the past decade, including multiple procedural reforms in the United States Senate. We argue the “nuclear option,” the reduction of the vote-threshold required to proceed to a final confirmation vote on judicial nominees (i.e., to invoke cloture) from three-fifths to a simple majority, contributed to a renewed escalation of partisan confirmation battles on which the Federalist Society capitalized. Pundits and politicians alike show growing concern about the role of interest groups, especially those associated with the conservative legal movement, in judicial nominations. The intersection of these two sets of changes raises questions about the contemporary judicial nominations process. Utilizing a novel dataset of Federalist Society (FedSoc) affiliates drawn from event listings (1993–2020), we analyze the interactive role of FedSoc affiliation with Senate procedural changes to the judicial confirmation process. We find affiliation with the Federalist Society, after the initial nuclear option was implemented, increases the probability of a circuit court nominee’s confirmation by approximately 20%.

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“…They are usually held in advance of a formal decision regarding a particular policy or appointment. Unlike Royal Commissions, these confirmation hearings are embedded directly in politics as usual (Farganis and Wedeking, 2014: 92). While public attitude towards the Supreme Court has tended to be positive, with many in the United States seeing it ‘as an atypical political institution’, Supreme Court confirmation hearings tend to be adversarial, occurring against the backdrop of partisan opposition and electoral politics (Krewson and Schroedel, 2020: 1431).…”

Section: Institutional Listening In Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Institutional listening in deliberative democracy: Towards a deliberative logic of transmission

Scudder

Ercan²,

McCallum

2021

Politics

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This article explores the role of institutional listening in deliberative democracy, focusing particularly on its contribution to the transmission process between the public sphere and formal institutions. We critique existing accounts of transmission for prioritizing voice over listening and for remaining constrained by an ‘aggregative logic’ of the flow of ideas and voices in a democracy. We argue that formal institutions have a crucial role to play in ensuring transmission operates according to a more deliberative logic. To substantiate this argument, we focus on two recent examples of institutional listening in two different democracies: Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the United States’ Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. These cases show that institutional listening can take different forms; it can be purposefully designed or incidental, and it can contribute to the realization of deliberative democracy in various ways. Specifically, institutional listening can help enhance the credibility and visibility of minority groups and perspectives while also empowering these groups to better hold formal political institutions accountable. In these ways, institutional listening helps transmission operate according to a more deliberative logic.

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Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings in the U.S. Senate

Cited by 19 publications

References 6 publications

Politicized Battles: How Vacancies and Partisanship Influence Support for the Supreme Court

Politicized Battles: How Vacancies and Partisanship Influence Support for the Supreme Court

Going Nuclear: Federalist Society Affiliated Judicial Nominees’ Prospects and a New Era of Confirmation Politics¹

Institutional listening in deliberative democracy: Towards a deliberative logic of transmission

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Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings in the U.S. Senate

Cited by 19 publications

References 6 publications

Politicized Battles: How Vacancies and Partisanship Influence Support for the Supreme Court

Politicized Battles: How Vacancies and Partisanship Influence Support for the Supreme Court

Going Nuclear: Federalist Society Affiliated Judicial Nominees’ Prospects and a New Era of Confirmation Politics1

Institutional listening in deliberative democracy: Towards a deliberative logic of transmission

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Product

Resources

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Going Nuclear: Federalist Society Affiliated Judicial Nominees’ Prospects and a New Era of Confirmation Politics¹