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 &
• 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