How the Supreme Court's Partisan Composition Affects Public Preferences for Nominees in a Post-Roe Era: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment

• In Event: Judicial Decision-Making and Public Policy: Insights from Recent Research

Abstract

What affects Americans' preferences for Supreme Court nominees? Because public opinion strongly influences Senate confirmation votes, it is important to understand how Americans prioritize factors such as a nominee's age, gender, current position, partisanship, race/ethnicity, religion, education, and law clerk experience. Previous conjoint experiments have explored this question by simply asking respondents to evaluate individual nominees. However, we hypothesize that Americans do not evaluate nominees as individuals in a vacuum; in the real world, Americans consider nominees in the broader context of the current Supreme Court. Certain attributes of an individual nominee may be more or less salient depending on the existing Court's partisan composition. Thus, using a preregistered survey experiment (n = 9,895), we ask respondents to consider different scenarios regarding the partisan composition of the Court. We then ask respondents to complete a conjoint experiment where they are asked to select one of two hypothetical nominees to be the ninth justice in their given scenario. We find that the partisan composition of the Court does affect how members of the public evaluate nominees, suggesting that the results of prior studies may not be externally valid. Our results show that both Democrats and Republicans are especially influenced by a nominee's partisanship when their side is solidly "losing" the Court, but not when their party is solidly "winning" the Court or even — contrary to our preregistered hypothesis — when the Court is split 4-4. This fear-based approach to judicial politics may reflect the broader trend of increasing affective polarization. We also find that other attributes, such as race and gender, play important roles in Americans' preferences. Finally, our study is the first conjoint experiment to measure preferences for Supreme Court nominees in the post-Roe era where public opinion towards the Supreme Court has reached a 50-year low and the Court appears to be embroiled in a "legitimacy crisis."

Authors

• Victor Yuhang Wu, Stanford University

• Yusaku Horiuchi, Dartmouth College