Replication data for: The Changing Dynamics of Senate Voting on Supreme Court Nominees

A near-universal consensus exists that the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987 triggered a new regime in the Senate's voting over presidential nominees—a regime that de-emphasizes ethics, competence, and integrity and stresses instead politics, philosophy, and ideology. Nonetheless, this conventional wisdom remains largely untested. In this article we explore the extent to which the Bork nomination has affected the decisions of U.S. Senators. To do so, we modernize, update, and backdate the standard account of confirmation politics offered by Cameron, Cover, and Segal (1990) to cover all candidates for the Supreme Court from Hugo Black in 1937 through John Roberts in 2005. Our results confirm conventional wisdom about the Bork nomination but with two notable caveats. First, while the importanc e of ideology has reached new heights, the Senate's emphasis on this factor had its genesis some three decades earlier, in the 1950s. Second, while ideology is of paramount concern to senators, a candidate's professional merit also remains a significant determinant of success in the Senate. <br /

The changing dynamics of Senate voting on Supreme Court nominees

A near-universal consensus exists that the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987 triggered a new regime in the Senate's voting over presidential nominees—a regime that deemphasizes ethics, competence, and integrity and stresses instead politics, philosophy, and ideology. Nonetheless, this conventional wisdom remains largely untested. In this paper we explore the extent to which the Bork nomination has affected the decisions of U.S. senators. To do so, we modernize, update, and backdate the standard account of confirmation politics offered by Cameron, Cover, and Segal (1990) to cover all candidates for the Supreme Court from Hugo L. Black in 1937 through John G. Roberts, Jr. in 2005. Our results confirm conventional wisdom about the Bork nomination but with two notable caveats. First, while the importance of ideology has reached new heights, the Senate's emphasis on this factor had its genesis some three decades earlier, in the 1950s. Second, while ideology is of paramount concern to senators, a candidate's professional merit also remains a significant determinant of success in the Senate

Replication data for: The Judicial Common Space

Assessing the empirical implications of many theoretical models of judicial politics requires a measurement strategy for placing relevant actors (judges of lower courts, justices of the Supreme Court, members of Congress, and the President) in the same policy space. We take up this challenge in three steps. We begin by explicating our measurement strategy, and then by explaining its advantages over previous efforts. Next we explore the results of our approach, and provide a descriptive look at data it yields: a "Judicial Common Space" score for all justices and judges serving between 1953 and 2000. The last section offers three contemporary applications---all of which, we hope, shore up the suitability and adaptability of the Judicial Common Space for research on law and courts

The Judicial Common Space 1

To say that positive political theory (PPT) scholarship on the hierarchy of justice is theory rich and data poor is to make a rather uncontroversial claim. For over a decade now, scholars have offered intriguing theoretical accounts aimed at understanding why lower courts defy (comply with) higher courts. But only rarely do they subject the accounts to rigorous empirical interrogation. The chief obstacle, it seems, is the lack of a reliable and valid measurement strategy for placing judges of lower courts and justices of higher courts in the same policy space. Without such a strategy, we can systematically test few, if any, hypotheses flowing from PPT models of the judicial hierarchy. With such an approach not only can we investigate the implications of these models, we can assess many others flowing from the larger PPT program on judging, as well. It is to the challenge of scaling judges and justices (as well as legislatures and executives) that we turn in this article. We begin by explicating our measurement strategy, and then by explaining its advantages over previous efforts. Next we explore the results of our approach and provide a descriptive look at data it yields: a ‘‘Judicial Common Space’’ (JCS) score for all justices and judges appointed since 1953. The last section offers three applications designed to shore up the suitability and adaptability of the JCS for a range of positive projects on the courts.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116218/1/jleo07b.pd