Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees.
Abstract: We study the
relationship between state-level public opinion
and the roll call votes of
senators on Supreme Court nominees. Applying
recent advances in multilevel modeling, we
use national polls on nine recent Supreme Court
nominees to produce state-of-the-art
estimates of public support for the confirmation
of each nominee in all 50 states. We
show that greater public support strongly
increases the probability that a senator will
vote to approve a nominee, even after
controlling for standard predictors of roll call
voting. We also find that the impact of opinion
varies with context: it has a greater
effect on opposition party senators, on
ideologically opposed senators, and for
generally weak nominees. These results establish
a systematic and powerful link between
constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court
nominees.
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