THE CHANGING DYNAMICS OF SENATE VOTING ON SUPREME COURT NOMINEES
Lee Epstein
René Lindstädt
Jeffrey A. Segal
Chad Westerland
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 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.
Click here for the article (.pdf)
Click here for the data (Stata .dta file) (posted on December 23, 2005)
Click here for an updated dataset (Stata .dta file) (posted on March 1, 2008)
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