Judging Ideology

• In Event: Ideology in the Federal Courts: Measurement and Theory

Abstract

The nomination and confirmation process for the United States courts of appeals has undergone a dramatic change in recent decades. Nay votes in the Senate and outright rejection of nominees has greatly increased, as has interest group involvement at both the nomination and confirmation stages. In this paper, I ask whether circuit court nominees have become more ideologically extreme and if such a change has contributed to the increased contentiousness in the Senate's treatment of nominees. Using text analysis, I analyze newspaper articles and other contemporaneous accounts of the nominees to construct an original dataset of ideology scores for all federal appeals court nominees from 1975 to 2016. In contrast to existing methods, this approach allows me to estimate the ideology of the nominees using data other than the ideology of the president and members of the Senate. Using these new scores, I test the proposition that, over time, presidents have offered more and more ideologically extreme nominees. I also evaluate whether presidents strategically tailor their selection of nominees in reaction to the partisan composition of the Senate and the amount of time left in the presidential term. Finally, I analyze whether the extremism of a nominee affects the senatorial vote choice.

Author

• Matthew Carr, Columbia University