Presidential Success in Supreme Court Appointments: Informational Effects and Institutional Constraints

Spatial models of Supreme Court appointments assume that the president knows the preferences of nominees and is constrained only by the ideology of the Senate. However, nominees vary in the amount of available information that can be used to determine their preferences. I find that justices who offered more information in the form of relevant professional experience at the time of nomination are more congruent with their appointing president. Institutional factors, such as polarization between the Senate and president, exert less influence on congruence. The president is, however, constrained from appointing highly experienced justices if the Senate and president are distant ideologically

How voters think about the electoral relevance of the Supreme Court

Despite sporadic claims that elections may serve as a referendum on the Supreme Court, prevailing theories of diffuse support imply that voters mostly ignore the Court. This paper tests that thesis. Using recent, nationally-representative survey data, Study 1 shows that, despite the Supreme Court being ranked as a middling issue of importance, high levels of diffuse support increase its perceived electoral relevance. Study 2 deploys a survey experiment, which illustrates that candidates who support (oppose) reform are viewed as stronger candidates among Democrats (Republicans), as well as more prototypically liberal (conservative). The sorting of demand for reform along partisan lines dovetails with a sorting of diffuse support, which presents an inherent irony for the prospects of reform: while low-legitimacy Democrats may support reform, lower levels of diffuse support are also linked to weaker perceptions of reform’s electoral relevance – providing mixed signals to candidates about the demand for reform

Supreme Court legitimacy exhibits new partisan sorting

We investigate the stability of Supreme Court legitimacy during a period of profound democratic backsliding. First, we construct an original dataset of surveys from 2012-2024 to illustrate that support for the Court has dramatically sorted since 2016. Second, we find that partisan sorting on several correlates of diffuse support fuels these partisan differences in Supreme Court legitimacy: Democrats are more cynical about the Court, disapprove of its outputs, and view obedience to the law fundamentally differently than Republicans, which contributes to a partisan gap in legitimacy. Third, and finally, we introduce and test whether a new measure of specific support, “fatalism,” over this new status quo, explains this sorting and a loss of legitimacy. Indeed, it does. Our results indicate that a combination of partisanship and a lack of specific support – not an absence of democratic values – explain why partisans now view the Supreme Court’s legitimacy differently

Replication Data for: Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior

Replication data and code for "Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior", published online November 5, 2018 in the Journal of Communication

Replication Data for: Spatial Models of Legislative Effectiveness

Spatial models of policymaking have evolved from the median voter theorem to the inclusion of institutional considerations such as committees, political parties, and various voting and amendment rules. Such models, however, implicitly assume that no policy is better than another at solving public policy problems and that all policymakers are equally effective at advancing proposals. We relax these assumptions, allowing some legislators to be more effective than others at creating high-quality proposals. The resulting Legislative Effectiveness Model (LEM) offers three main benefits. First, it can better account for policy changes based on the quality of the status quo, changing our understanding of how to overcome gridlock in polarized legislatures. Second, it generalizes canonical models of legislative politics, such as median voter, setter, and pivotal politics models, all of which emerge as special cases within the LEM. Third, the LEM offers significant new empirical predictions, some of which we test (and find support for) within the U.S. Congress