Making the Supreme Court : the politics of appointments, 1930-2020 / Charles M. Cameron, Jonathan P. Kastellec.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cameron, Charles M. (Charles Metz), 1954- author.

Kastellec, Jonathan P., author.

Series:

Oxford scholarship online.

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Judges--Selection and appointment--United States--History.

Political questions and judicial power--United States--History.

United States. Supreme Court--Officials and employees--Selection and appointment--History.

United States. Supreme Court--Officials and employees--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (499 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2023.

Summary:

In 'Making the Supreme Court', Charles M. Cameron and Jonathan P. Kastellec examine 90 years of American political history to show how the growth of federal judicial power from the 1930s onward inspired a multitude of groups struggling to shape judicial policy. As Cameron and Kastellec argue, the result is a new politics aimed squarely at selecting and placing judicial ideologues on the Court. They make the case that this new model gradually transformed how the Court itself operates, turning it into an ideologically driven and polarized branch. Based on rich data and qualitative evidence, this text provides a sharp lens on the social and political transformations that created a new American politics.

Contents:

Cover

Making the Supreme Court: The Politics of Appointments, 1930-2020

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Acknowledgments

Part I: What Happened

Chapter 1: Then and Now

1.2 The Pelican Problem

1.3 A Lens on American Politics

1.3.1 A Separation-of-Powers Laboratory

1.3.2 The New American Politics

1.3.3 The Growth of Government and the Rise of the Judicial State

1.3.4 From Pluralism to Hyper-Pluralism

1.3.5 The Polarization of Political Elites

1.3.6 The Resurgence of Divided Party Government

1.3.7 Ideologically Sorted, Informationally Bifurcated

1.4 The Politics of Supreme Court Appointments

1.4.1 The Process

1.4.2 The Changes

Party &amp

Activist Interest in the Court

Presidential Vetting

Nominee Characteristics

Interest Group Mobilization

Media Coverage

Presidents Going Public

Senate Hearings

Public Opinion

Senate Voting and Voter Electoral Response

Appointee Behavior on the Court

Exits from the Court

Summary

1.5 How to Read This Book

Chapter 2: The Party Demands: Party Agendas for the Supreme Court

2.2 Party Platforms and Party Agendas: Theoretical Foundations

Downsian Platforms

Coalition Contracts

2.3 The Parties' Agendas for Supreme Court Nominees

2.3.1 Cases

2.3.2 Appointments

Policy Litmus Tests

Ideological Requirements for Nominees

Quality

Diversity

A Note about Party Factions and Southern Democrats

2.3.3 Hot-Button Cases and Their Topics

2.3.4 Specific Policy Litmus Tests

2.3.5 General Ideological Demands

2.3.6 Index of Party Interest in Supreme Court Policy

2.3.7 Diversity Promises and Calls for Quality

2.4 Explaining the Party Positions: Evidence from Convention Delegates Survey

Abortion Preferences and Group Membership over Time

Delegate Diversity

2.5 Conclusion.

Chapter 3: Selecting How to Select: Presidents and Organizational Design

3.2 Procedural Design: Presidential Interest, Executive Resources

3.2.1 A (Sketch) Theory of Presidential Procedural Choice

3.3 The Growth of a Legal Policy Elite

3.3.1 The Justice Department

3.3.2 The White House

Growth of Presidential Staff

The White House Legal Counsel

3.4 The Growth of Professionalism

3.4.1 The Short List

3.4.2 Thinking It Over: The Duration of the Selection Process

3.5 Portraits of the Process

3.5.1 No Delegation

Herbert Hoover: No Delegation by Default

Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ringmaster at Work

3.5.2 External Delegation

Dwight D. Eisenhower: Politicized Delegation

Ronald Reagan: Contested Delegation

3.5.3 Internal Delegation

George H.W. Bush: Pragmatism Gone Awry

Bill Clinton: White House Chaos

Trump: Internal Delegation with Outsourcing

3.6 Conclusion

Chapter 4: The Candidates for the Court and the Nominees

4.2 Ideology

4.2.1 The Nominees

4.2.2 The Short Listers

4.3 Experience and Policy Reliability

4.4 Racial and Gender Diversity

4.5 Age

4.6 Religion

4.7 Geography

4.8 Conclusion

Chapter 5: Interest Groups

5.2 A Portrait of the Groups and Their Behavior

5.2.1 Levels of Mobilization

5.2.2 Who Participated: The Changing Nature of the Groups

5.2.3 Choice of Tactics and Timing

The Timing of Mobilization

Summary of Tactics and Timing

5.3 Eras of Formation and Activation

5.3.1 Birth Years

5.3.2 Activation Years

5.3.3 Gestation

5.3.4 Activation by Judicial Lobbyists versus Non-lobbyists

5.4 Ideology, Ideological Polarization, and Mobilization

5.4.1 Predicting Mobilization

5.5 Conclusion

Chapter 6: The Media: Co-authored with Leeann Bass and Julian Dean

6.2 Newspaper and Television Coverage of Nominations.

Newspapers

Broadcast Television

Cable Television

6.2.1 Frequency of Coverage over Time

6.2.2 The Structure of Coverage

6.2.3 Topics of Coverage

Top Phrases

Topic Models

6.2.4 Cable News Coverage: The Kavanaugh Nomination

6.3 Newspaper Editorials

6.3.1 Changes in Quantity over Time

6.3.2 Editorial "Votes" on Nominees

6.3.3 Ideology and Quality

6.4 Conclusion

Chapter 7: Public Opinion

7.2 The Public Opinion Data

7.3 Visible and Invisible Nominees

7.4 Opinion Holding

Summary of Opinion Holding

7.5 Popularity and Unpopularity

7.5.1 Popularity, Unpopularity, and Net Popularity

7.5.2 Popularity and Nominee Attributes

7.5.3 Differences in Partisan Response

7.6 The Nomination Campaigns: High Impact or Low?

7.6.1 Early to Late: Minimal Effects?

7.6.2 Partisanship and Campaign Effects

7.6.3 Do the Hearings Matter? What about Scandals?

7.7 Conclusion

Chapter 8: Decision in the Senate

8.2 Failure and Success over Time

8.2.1 The Role of Senate Control and Nomination Timing

8.2.2 Party Control and Roll Call Margins

8.3 Ideology and Racial Politics in 1930-2020 Nominations

8.3.1 Ideology: Concept and Measurement

8.3.2 Roll Call Voting and Dimensionality: The Changing Role of Race

8.4 The Importance of Ideological Distance

8.4.1 Modeling Individual Roll Call Votes

8.5 Conclusion

Part II: Why it Happened

Chapter 9: The Logic of Presidential Selection

9.2 The Characteristics Approach to Presidential Appointments

9.2.1 What's a Nominee?

Ideology

Policy Reliability

Diversity Traits

9.2.2 How Presidents Value Nominee Characteristics

9.2.3 Presidential Demand for Nominee Characteristics: Empirical Predictions

9.3 The President's Policy Interest in the Court

9.4 The President's "Farm Team"

9.4.1 The Size of the Farm Team.

9.4.2 Ideology

9.4.3 Policy Reliability

9.4.4 Diversity

9.5 Does It Work? Taking the Theory to Data

9.5.1 Testing the Demand for Ideology

Additional Covariates

Presidential Ideology

The Extant Court's Ideology

The Costs of Purchasing Additional Ideology

Regression Results

9.5.2 Testing the Demand for Reliability

9.5.3 Testing the President's Demand for Diversity

9.6 Understanding Changes in Selection Politics

9.6.1 The Rise of Ideological Nominees

9.6.2 The Importance of Seeding the Lower Courts

9.7 Conclusion

Chapter 10: What the Public Wanted

10.2 Thinking about Citizens Thinking: The LTA Framework

10.3 Citizen Perceptions of Nominee Ideology

10.3.1 The Basis of Perceptions

10.3.2 Partisan Impact: Ideology versus Party

10.4 Answering Surveys: "Approve, Disapprove, Don't know"

10.4.1 Estimating the Workhorse Regressions

10.5 The Partisan Gap in Evaluations

10.5.1 Defining the Partisan Gap

10.5.2 The Partisan Gap from O'Connor to Barrett

10.5.3 Why the Gap and Why the Change?

The Coefficients over Time

The Growth of Ideological Distance

Party and Ideology in the Partisan Gap

10.6 Conclusion: What They Wanted and What They Got

Chapter 11: Voting in the Shadow of Accountability: Senators' Confirmation Decisions

11.2 Roll Calls and Accountability: General Theoretical Considerations

11.2.1 What Do Citizens Want in a Representative?

11.2.2 What Do Citizens Observe? Actions, Consequences, and Knowledge

11.2.3 Accountable to Whom? Multiple Principals

11.3 Senators' Vote Decisions: The Importance of Nominee Visibility

11.4 Constituent Response to Roll Calls

11.4.1 Voter Recall of Senator Votes

Voter Recall and Political Engagement

11.4.2 Does Reality Predict Perceptions?.

11.4.3 Do Perceptions Affect Evaluation?

11.4.4 Perceptions and Voter Evaluations

11.4.5 Comparing Nominations to Other Issues

11.5 Which Principal? Cross-Pressured Voting and Biased Representation

Empirical Analysis of Cross-Pressured Voting

11.6 Conclusion

Part III: How it Matters, and What the Future Holds

Chapter 12: New Politics, New Justices, New Policies: The Courts That Politics Made

12.2 The Judicial Partisan Sort

12.2.1 Detecting the Judicial Partisan Sort

12.3 What Caused the Judicial Partisan Sort?

12.3.1 Reliability Revisited

12.3.2 Justice-President Policy Congruence

12.3.3 Congruence and Reliability Together

12.4 The Impact of Litmus Tests

12.4.1 Data

12.4.2 Descriptive Analysis

12.4.3 Two Stronger Research Designs

12.4.4 Summary: Do Policy Litmus Tests Work?

12.5 The Ideological Structure of the court

12.5.1 The Median Justice Approach

12.5.2 Majority Coalition Approach

12.6 Court Structure and Collective Choice: Fourth Amendment Law

12.6.1 Modeling Court Structure and Case Dispositions

12.6.2 Court Structure and Majority Opinion Content

12.7 Conclusion: Judicial Personnel Is Judicial Policy

Chapter 13: The Future: The Courts That Politics May Make

13.2 Modeling the Future: The MSC Simulator

13.2.1 The Basic Idea

13.2.2 Key Design Choices

The Initial Court

Control of the Presidency and the Senate

13.2.3 Exits

13.2.4 Entrances: Age and Ideology

13.2.5 Summary of Policy Experiments

13.3 The Baseline Scenario

13.3.1 The Median Justice and Bloc Sizes

13.3.2 Tenure Length and Strategic Retirements

13.3.3 The Importance of Ideological Reliability

13.4 The Transformative Election of 2016

13.5 A Plausible Future: The End of Divided Government Appointments

13.5.1 The Incredible Shrinking Supreme Court?.

13.5.2 The Senate Map: Greater Republican Advantage.

Notes:

Also issued in print: 2023.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on August 31, 2023).

ISBN:

0-19-768057-7

0-19-768055-0

0-19-768056-9