Jonathan P Kastellec
Biographic Data
| ID | 1103797 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan P Kastellec |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan P |
| FAMILY NAME | Kastellec |
| SIGNATURE | KASTELLEC J P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7338-248X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 467 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
A Database of the United States Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket, 1993–2025
The last decade has witnessed a significant increase in academic and journalistic interest in the United States Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” Yet despite this increased interest, there exists no systematic database of the shadow docket. This paper summarizes the Supreme Court Shadow Docket Database, which we created by parsing the Journal of the Supreme Court from the 1993 through 2024 terms into individual orders. We categorize these orders i…
Mass Versus Donor Attitudes on the Importance of Supreme Court Nominations
While Supreme Court nominations have become increasingly high-salience political events, we know little about their prioritization relative to other issues by core constituency groups. We examine how individual donors and the mass public prioritize nominations, as well as factors they believe presidents should consider when selecting judges. To do so, we constructed original questions for a survey of over 7,000 validated donors and a comparison g…
Is the U.S. Supreme Court Facing a Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy? A Review Article
Kevin McMahon's A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other examines the extent to which the current Supreme Court—and its conservative supermajority—departs from earlier courts in the extent to which it suffers from a “democracy gap.” McMahon persuasively argues that the current Court is different for two reasons. First, most of the justices in the conservative majority were appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote and/or were confirmed by …
The Supreme Court: How Did We Get Here? And What Comes Next
The politics of appointments have transformed the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years. We examine why and how the current conservative supermajority on the court came to be, with a particular focus on how this court stands apart from earlier ones. We trace the factors that allowed President Donald Trump to reshape the court with his three appointments in his first term and evaluate the importance of the conservative supermajority by connecting it …
The Revolving Door in Judicial Politics: Former Clerks and Agenda Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court
We examine the role of former clerks to Supreme Court justices on the Court’s agenda setting process. We find that when a former clerk is the attorney on either a cert petition or an amicus brief, the Court is more likely to hear a case, compared to advocacy by a non-former clerk. To help explain these patterns, we draw on the broader literature on “revolving door” politics. We argue that the most plausible mechanisms are either that former clerk…
The politics of accountability in Supreme Court nominations: Voter Recall and Assessment of Senator Votes on Nominees
While longstanding theories of political behavior argue that voters do not possess sufficient political knowledge to hold their elected representatives accountable, recent revisionist studies challenge this view, arguing that voters can both follow how their representatives vote and use that information intelligently. We apply the revisionist account to the study of Supreme Court nominations in the modern era. Using survey data on the nominations…
A theory of policy sabotage
We develop a theory of policymaking that examines when policy sabotage—the deliberate choice by an opposition party to interfere with the implementation of a policy—can be an effective electoral strategy, even if rational voters can observe that it is happening. In our model, a potential saboteur chooses whether to sabotage an incumbent’s policy by blocking its successful implementation. A voter then decides whether to retain the incumbent, who i…
From Textbook Pluralism to Modern Hyperpluralism: Interest Groups and Supreme Court Nominations, 1930–2017
We examine interest group involvement in Supreme Court nominations from 1930 to 2017, finding dramatic shifts in the number and type of groups, as well as their choice of tactics. Whereas the early period was dominated by labor unions, “core” civil rights groups, and groups affiliated with the “old right,” the modern period is dominated by public interest/citizen groups and “identity” groups. We also find a shift from more traditional “inside” ta…
Presidential Selection of Supreme Court Nominees: The Characteristics Approach
Despite the importance of every nomination to the Supreme Court, a unified theory that illuminates presidential selection of nominees across the modern political era remains elusive. We propose a new theory — the “characteristics approach” — that envisions nominees as bundles of characteristics, such as ideology, policy reliability, and attributes of diversity. We formalize the theory, which emphasizes the political returns to presidents from a n…
Judicial Federalism and Representation
I examine the relationship between judicial federalism and state-level representation. I develop a framework in which federal courts establish a federal “floor” in a policy area, thus creating an asymmetry—states with lower levels of policy must shift policy to the floor, whereas states with higher levels of policy above the floor are unaffected. I use the framework to recast the “countermajoritarian difficulty” as an issue of federalism. To illu…
How Courts Structure State-Level Representation
I examine how courts condition the relationship between state-level public opinion and policy. The system of federalism in the United States allows federal and state courts to establish the types of policies that states are constitutionally allowed to implement. In particular, federal courts can set “federal floors” for policy, below which no states can go. State courts, in turn, can raise the level of this floor. Thus, both federal and state cou…
Empirically Evaluating the Countermajoritarian Difficulty: Public Opinion, State Policy, and Judicial Review before Roe v. Wade
I conduct a quantitative evaluation of the “countermajoritarian difficulty” by examining the relationship between public opinion, state policy, and judicial review in constitutional challenges to state abortion statutes in the period before Roe v. Wade . I find that state and lower federal court judges tended to invalidate statutes in states with high levels of public support for moving policy away from the status quo, and judges did not strike d…
Are Supreme Court Nominations a Move-the-Median Game
We conduct a theoretical and empirical re-evaluation of move-the-median (MTM) models of Supreme Court nominations-the one theory of appointment politics that connects presidential selection and senatorial confirmation decisions. We develop a theoretical framework that encompasses the major extant models, formalizing the tradeoff between concerns about the location of the new median justice versus concerns about the ideology of the nominee herself…
Signaling and Counter‐Signaling in the Judicial Hierarchy: An Empirical Analysis of En Banc Review
We leverage the institutional features of American courts to evaluate the importance of whistleblowers in hierarchical oversight. Drawing on a formal theory of signaling in the judicial hierarchy, we examine the role of whistleblowing dissents in triggering en banc review of three‐judge panels by full circuits of the Courts of Appeals. The theory generates predictions about how dissent interacts with judicial preferences to influence circuits' re…
Polarizing the Electoral Connection: Partisan Representation in Supreme Court Confirmation Politics
Do senators respond to the preferences of their state's median voter or only to the preferences of their copartisans? We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship so that scholars can distinguish between general and partisan responsiveness. We use this to study responsiveness in the context of Senate confirmation votes on Supreme Court nominees. We find that senators weight their partisan base far more…
Source Cues and Public Support for the Supreme Court
It is well known that the public often relies on cues or heuristics when forming opinions. At the same time, leading theories of opinion formation about the Supreme Court see such support as relatively fixed. Using a series of survey experiments, we find source cues significantly influence the public’s support for the Court, including the extent to which individuals believe the Court should be independent from the elected branches. Specifically, …
The Interplay of Ideological Diversity, Dissents, and Discretionary Review in the Judicial Hierarchy: Evidence from Death Penalty Cases
We use an original dataset of death penalty decisions on the Courts of Appeals to evaluate how the institutions of multimember appellate courts, dissent, and discretionary higher-court review interact to increase legal consistency in the federal judicial hierarchy. First, beginning with three-judge panels, we show the existence of ideological diversity on a panel—and the potential for dissent—plays a significant role in judicial decision making. …
Whistleblowing and Compliance in the Judicial Hierarchy
One way that principals can overcome the problem of informational asymmetries in hierarchical organizations is to enable whistleblowing. We evaluate how whistleblowing influences compliance in the judicial hierarchy. We present a formal model in which a potential whistleblower may, at some cost, signal noncompliance by a lower court to a higher court. A key insight of the model is that whistleblowing is most informative when it is rare. While the…
The Supreme Court and Percolation in the Lower Courts: An Optimal Stopping Model
We examine how the Supreme Court learns from lower court decisions to evaluate new legal issues. We present a theory of optimal stopping in which the Court learns from successive rulings on new issues by lower courts but incurs a cost when lower courts come into conflict with one another. The Court faces a strategic trade-off between allowing conflict to continue while it learns about a new legal issue and intervening to end a costly conflict bet…
Voting for Justices: Change and Continuity in Confirmation Voting 1937–2010
The contentiousness of Senate voting on Supreme Court nominations increased dramatically from 1937 to 2010. We identify four potential sources of the increase: (1) changes in the Senate; (2) changes in the nominees; (3) changes in the political environment; and, (4) changes in senators' evaluative criteria. Using new data and improved statistical techniques, we estimate a well-performing model of senators' individual voting choices on Supreme Cou…
Racial Diversity and Judicial Influence on Appellate Courts
This article evaluates the substantive consequences of judicial diversity on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Due to the small percentage of racial minorities on the federal bench, the key question in evaluating these consequences is not whether minority judges vote differently from nonminority judges, but whether their presence on appellate courts influences their colleagues and affects case outcomes. Using matching methods, I show that black judges …
Hierarchical and Collegial Politics on the U.S. Courts of Appeals
Do hierarchical politics in the federal judiciary shape collegial politics on the U.S. Courts of Appeals and thus influence judicial voting and case outcomes? I develop a model in which the political control of the dual layer of hierarchy above three-judge panels—full circuits and the Supreme Court—affects the ability of a single Democratic or Republican judge on a three-judge panel to influence two colleagues from the opposing party. The theory …
Panel Composition and Voting on the U.S. Courts of Appeals over Time
This article investigates two issues unexplored in studies of the relationship between panel composition and voting on three-judge panels of the Courts of Appeals: how often will panel composition influence case outcomes, and how has the relationship between panel composition and panel voting changed over time? The author shows that while long stretches of single-party control of the presidency in the first half of the twentieth century often pro…
Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees
Does public opinion influence Supreme Court confirmation politics? We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll-call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of 10 recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We …
Predicting and Dissecting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2006 U.S. House Election
As the 2006 midterm elections approached, pollsters, scholars, and journalists attempted to predict whether the Democrats would take back the House, Senate, or both. Much media attention was paid to President George W. Bush's declining popularity and the public's dissatisfaction with the Republican-controlled Congress (see e.g., Cook 2006). With most attention paid to the immediate political dynamics of the campaign, less noticed (though not enti…
Using Graphs Instead of Tables in Political Science
When political scientists present empirical results, they are much more likely to use tables than graphs, despite the fact that graphs greatly increases the clarity of presentation and makes it easier for a reader to understand the data being used and to draw clear and correct inferences. Using a sample of leading journals, we document this tendency and suggest reasons why researchers prefer tables. We argue that the extra work required in produc…
Racial Diversity and Judicial Influence on Appellate Courts
This article evaluates the substantive consequences of judicial diversity on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Due to the small percentage of racial minorities on the federal bench, the key question in evaluating these consequences is not whether minority judges vote differently from nonminority judges, but whether their presence on appellate courts influences their colleagues and affects case outcomes. Using matching methods, I show that black judges …
Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees
Does public opinion influence Supreme Court confirmation politics? We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll-call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of 10 recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We …
Polarizing the Electoral Connection: Partisan Representation in Supreme Court Confirmation Politics
Do senators respond to the preferences of their state's median voter or only to the preferences of their copartisans? We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship so that scholars can distinguish between general and partisan responsiveness. We use this to study responsiveness in the context of Senate confirmation votes on Supreme Court nominees. We find that senators weight their partisan base far more…
Source Cues and Public Support for the Supreme Court
It is well known that the public often relies on cues or heuristics when forming opinions. At the same time, leading theories of opinion formation about the Supreme Court see such support as relatively fixed. Using a series of survey experiments, we find source cues significantly influence the public’s support for the Court, including the extent to which individuals believe the Court should be independent from the elected branches. Specifically, …
Whistleblowing and Compliance in the Judicial Hierarchy
One way that principals can overcome the problem of informational asymmetries in hierarchical organizations is to enable whistleblowing. We evaluate how whistleblowing influences compliance in the judicial hierarchy. We present a formal model in which a potential whistleblower may, at some cost, signal noncompliance by a lower court to a higher court. A key insight of the model is that whistleblowing is most informative when it is rare. While the…
Hierarchical and Collegial Politics on the U.S. Courts of Appeals
Do hierarchical politics in the federal judiciary shape collegial politics on the U.S. Courts of Appeals and thus influence judicial voting and case outcomes? I develop a model in which the political control of the dual layer of hierarchy above three-judge panels—full circuits and the Supreme Court—affects the ability of a single Democratic or Republican judge on a three-judge panel to influence two colleagues from the opposing party. The theory …
Voting for Justices: Change and Continuity in Confirmation Voting 1937–2010
The contentiousness of Senate voting on Supreme Court nominations increased dramatically from 1937 to 2010. We identify four potential sources of the increase: (1) changes in the Senate; (2) changes in the nominees; (3) changes in the political environment; and, (4) changes in senators' evaluative criteria. Using new data and improved statistical techniques, we estimate a well-performing model of senators' individual voting choices on Supreme Cou…
The Interplay of Ideological Diversity, Dissents, and Discretionary Review in the Judicial Hierarchy: Evidence from Death Penalty Cases
We use an original dataset of death penalty decisions on the Courts of Appeals to evaluate how the institutions of multimember appellate courts, dissent, and discretionary higher-court review interact to increase legal consistency in the federal judicial hierarchy. First, beginning with three-judge panels, we show the existence of ideological diversity on a panel—and the potential for dissent—plays a significant role in judicial decision making. …
The Supreme Court and Percolation in the Lower Courts: An Optimal Stopping Model
We examine how the Supreme Court learns from lower court decisions to evaluate new legal issues. We present a theory of optimal stopping in which the Court learns from successive rulings on new issues by lower courts but incurs a cost when lower courts come into conflict with one another. The Court faces a strategic trade-off between allowing conflict to continue while it learns about a new legal issue and intervening to end a costly conflict bet…
Panel Composition and Voting on the U.S. Courts of Appeals over Time
This article investigates two issues unexplored in studies of the relationship between panel composition and voting on three-judge panels of the Courts of Appeals: how often will panel composition influence case outcomes, and how has the relationship between panel composition and panel voting changed over time? The author shows that while long stretches of single-party control of the presidency in the first half of the twentieth century often pro…
The politics of accountability in Supreme Court nominations: Voter Recall and Assessment of Senator Votes on Nominees
While longstanding theories of political behavior argue that voters do not possess sufficient political knowledge to hold their elected representatives accountable, recent revisionist studies challenge this view, arguing that voters can both follow how their representatives vote and use that information intelligently. We apply the revisionist account to the study of Supreme Court nominations in the modern era. Using survey data on the nominations…
A theory of policy sabotage
We develop a theory of policymaking that examines when policy sabotage—the deliberate choice by an opposition party to interfere with the implementation of a policy—can be an effective electoral strategy, even if rational voters can observe that it is happening. In our model, a potential saboteur chooses whether to sabotage an incumbent’s policy by blocking its successful implementation. A voter then decides whether to retain the incumbent, who i…
Signaling and Counter‐Signaling in the Judicial Hierarchy: An Empirical Analysis of En Banc Review
We leverage the institutional features of American courts to evaluate the importance of whistleblowers in hierarchical oversight. Drawing on a formal theory of signaling in the judicial hierarchy, we examine the role of whistleblowing dissents in triggering en banc review of three‐judge panels by full circuits of the Courts of Appeals. The theory generates predictions about how dissent interacts with judicial preferences to influence circuits' re…
From Textbook Pluralism to Modern Hyperpluralism: Interest Groups and Supreme Court Nominations, 1930–2017
We examine interest group involvement in Supreme Court nominations from 1930 to 2017, finding dramatic shifts in the number and type of groups, as well as their choice of tactics. Whereas the early period was dominated by labor unions, “core” civil rights groups, and groups affiliated with the “old right,” the modern period is dominated by public interest/citizen groups and “identity” groups. We also find a shift from more traditional “inside” ta…
Presidential Selection of Supreme Court Nominees: The Characteristics Approach
Despite the importance of every nomination to the Supreme Court, a unified theory that illuminates presidential selection of nominees across the modern political era remains elusive. We propose a new theory — the “characteristics approach” — that envisions nominees as bundles of characteristics, such as ideology, policy reliability, and attributes of diversity. We formalize the theory, which emphasizes the political returns to presidents from a n…
How Courts Structure State-Level Representation
I examine how courts condition the relationship between state-level public opinion and policy. The system of federalism in the United States allows federal and state courts to establish the types of policies that states are constitutionally allowed to implement. In particular, federal courts can set “federal floors” for policy, below which no states can go. State courts, in turn, can raise the level of this floor. Thus, both federal and state cou…
Are Supreme Court Nominations a Move-the-Median Game
We conduct a theoretical and empirical re-evaluation of move-the-median (MTM) models of Supreme Court nominations-the one theory of appointment politics that connects presidential selection and senatorial confirmation decisions. We develop a theoretical framework that encompasses the major extant models, formalizing the tradeoff between concerns about the location of the new median justice versus concerns about the ideology of the nominee herself…
The Supreme Court: How Did We Get Here? And What Comes Next
The politics of appointments have transformed the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years. We examine why and how the current conservative supermajority on the court came to be, with a particular focus on how this court stands apart from earlier ones. We trace the factors that allowed President Donald Trump to reshape the court with his three appointments in his first term and evaluate the importance of the conservative supermajority by connecting it …
Predicting and Dissecting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2006 U.S. House Election
As the 2006 midterm elections approached, pollsters, scholars, and journalists attempted to predict whether the Democrats would take back the House, Senate, or both. Much media attention was paid to President George W. Bush's declining popularity and the public's dissatisfaction with the Republican-controlled Congress (see e.g., Cook 2006). With most attention paid to the immediate political dynamics of the campaign, less noticed (though not enti…
The Revolving Door in Judicial Politics: Former Clerks and Agenda Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court
We examine the role of former clerks to Supreme Court justices on the Court’s agenda setting process. We find that when a former clerk is the attorney on either a cert petition or an amicus brief, the Court is more likely to hear a case, compared to advocacy by a non-former clerk. To help explain these patterns, we draw on the broader literature on “revolving door” politics. We argue that the most plausible mechanisms are either that former clerk…
Empirically Evaluating the Countermajoritarian Difficulty: Public Opinion, State Policy, and Judicial Review before Roe v. Wade
I conduct a quantitative evaluation of the “countermajoritarian difficulty” by examining the relationship between public opinion, state policy, and judicial review in constitutional challenges to state abortion statutes in the period before Roe v. Wade . I find that state and lower federal court judges tended to invalidate statutes in states with high levels of public support for moving policy away from the status quo, and judges did not strike d…
The Playing Field Shifts: Predicting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2008 U.S. House Elections
The 2008 U.S. House elections mark the first time since 1994 that the Democrats will seek to retain a majority. With the political climate favoring Democrats this year, it seems almost certain that the party will retain control, and will likely increase its share of seats. In five national polls taken in June of this year, Democrats enjoyed on average a 13-point advantage in the generic congressional ballot; as Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien (2007)…
Using Graphs Instead of Tables in Political Science
When political scientists present empirical results, they are much more likely to use tables than graphs, despite the fact that graphs greatly increases the clarity of presentation and makes it easier for a reader to understand the data being used and to draw clear and correct inferences. Using a sample of leading journals, we document this tendency and suggest reasons why researchers prefer tables. We argue that the extra work required in produc…
Predicting and Dissecting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2006 U.S. House Election
As the 2006 midterm elections approached, pollsters, scholars, and journalists attempted to predict whether the Democrats would take back the House, Senate, or both. Much media attention was paid to President George W. Bush's declining popularity and the public's dissatisfaction with the Republican-controlled Congress (see e.g., Cook 2006). With most attention paid to the immediate political dynamics of the campaign, less noticed (though not enti…
The Playing Field Shifts: Predicting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2008 U.S. House Elections
The 2008 U.S. House elections mark the first time since 1994 that the Democrats will seek to retain a majority. With the political climate favoring Democrats this year, it seems almost certain that the party will retain control, and will likely increase its share of seats. In five national polls taken in June of this year, Democrats enjoyed on average a 13-point advantage in the generic congressional ballot; as Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien (2007)…
Panel Composition and Voting on the U.S. Courts of Appeals over Time
This article investigates two issues unexplored in studies of the relationship between panel composition and voting on three-judge panels of the Courts of Appeals: how often will panel composition influence case outcomes, and how has the relationship between panel composition and panel voting changed over time? The author shows that while long stretches of single-party control of the presidency in the first half of the twentieth century often pro…
Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees
Does public opinion influence Supreme Court confirmation politics? We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll-call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of 10 recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We …
Hierarchical and Collegial Politics on the U.S. Courts of Appeals
Do hierarchical politics in the federal judiciary shape collegial politics on the U.S. Courts of Appeals and thus influence judicial voting and case outcomes? I develop a model in which the political control of the dual layer of hierarchy above three-judge panels—full circuits and the Supreme Court—affects the ability of a single Democratic or Republican judge on a three-judge panel to influence two colleagues from the opposing party. The theory …
The Supreme Court and Percolation in the Lower Courts: An Optimal Stopping Model
We examine how the Supreme Court learns from lower court decisions to evaluate new legal issues. We present a theory of optimal stopping in which the Court learns from successive rulings on new issues by lower courts but incurs a cost when lower courts come into conflict with one another. The Court faces a strategic trade-off between allowing conflict to continue while it learns about a new legal issue and intervening to end a costly conflict bet…
Voting for Justices: Change and Continuity in Confirmation Voting 1937–2010
The contentiousness of Senate voting on Supreme Court nominations increased dramatically from 1937 to 2010. We identify four potential sources of the increase: (1) changes in the Senate; (2) changes in the nominees; (3) changes in the political environment; and, (4) changes in senators' evaluative criteria. Using new data and improved statistical techniques, we estimate a well-performing model of senators' individual voting choices on Supreme Cou…
Racial Diversity and Judicial Influence on Appellate Courts
This article evaluates the substantive consequences of judicial diversity on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Due to the small percentage of racial minorities on the federal bench, the key question in evaluating these consequences is not whether minority judges vote differently from nonminority judges, but whether their presence on appellate courts influences their colleagues and affects case outcomes. Using matching methods, I show that black judges …
The Interplay of Ideological Diversity, Dissents, and Discretionary Review in the Judicial Hierarchy: Evidence from Death Penalty Cases
We use an original dataset of death penalty decisions on the Courts of Appeals to evaluate how the institutions of multimember appellate courts, dissent, and discretionary higher-court review interact to increase legal consistency in the federal judicial hierarchy. First, beginning with three-judge panels, we show the existence of ideological diversity on a panel—and the potential for dissent—plays a significant role in judicial decision making. …
Whistleblowing and Compliance in the Judicial Hierarchy
One way that principals can overcome the problem of informational asymmetries in hierarchical organizations is to enable whistleblowing. We evaluate how whistleblowing influences compliance in the judicial hierarchy. We present a formal model in which a potential whistleblower may, at some cost, signal noncompliance by a lower court to a higher court. A key insight of the model is that whistleblowing is most informative when it is rare. While the…
Signaling and Counter‐Signaling in the Judicial Hierarchy: An Empirical Analysis of En Banc Review
We leverage the institutional features of American courts to evaluate the importance of whistleblowers in hierarchical oversight. Drawing on a formal theory of signaling in the judicial hierarchy, we examine the role of whistleblowing dissents in triggering en banc review of three‐judge panels by full circuits of the Courts of Appeals. The theory generates predictions about how dissent interacts with judicial preferences to influence circuits' re…
Polarizing the Electoral Connection: Partisan Representation in Supreme Court Confirmation Politics
Do senators respond to the preferences of their state's median voter or only to the preferences of their copartisans? We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship so that scholars can distinguish between general and partisan responsiveness. We use this to study responsiveness in the context of Senate confirmation votes on Supreme Court nominees. We find that senators weight their partisan base far more…
Source Cues and Public Support for the Supreme Court
It is well known that the public often relies on cues or heuristics when forming opinions. At the same time, leading theories of opinion formation about the Supreme Court see such support as relatively fixed. Using a series of survey experiments, we find source cues significantly influence the public’s support for the Court, including the extent to which individuals believe the Court should be independent from the elected branches. Specifically, …
Empirically Evaluating the Countermajoritarian Difficulty: Public Opinion, State Policy, and Judicial Review before Roe v. Wade
I conduct a quantitative evaluation of the “countermajoritarian difficulty” by examining the relationship between public opinion, state policy, and judicial review in constitutional challenges to state abortion statutes in the period before Roe v. Wade . I find that state and lower federal court judges tended to invalidate statutes in states with high levels of public support for moving policy away from the status quo, and judges did not strike d…
Are Supreme Court Nominations a Move-the-Median Game
We conduct a theoretical and empirical re-evaluation of move-the-median (MTM) models of Supreme Court nominations-the one theory of appointment politics that connects presidential selection and senatorial confirmation decisions. We develop a theoretical framework that encompasses the major extant models, formalizing the tradeoff between concerns about the location of the new median justice versus concerns about the ideology of the nominee herself…
Judicial Federalism and Representation
I examine the relationship between judicial federalism and state-level representation. I develop a framework in which federal courts establish a federal “floor” in a policy area, thus creating an asymmetry—states with lower levels of policy must shift policy to the floor, whereas states with higher levels of policy above the floor are unaffected. I use the framework to recast the “countermajoritarian difficulty” as an issue of federalism. To illu…
How Courts Structure State-Level Representation
I examine how courts condition the relationship between state-level public opinion and policy. The system of federalism in the United States allows federal and state courts to establish the types of policies that states are constitutionally allowed to implement. In particular, federal courts can set “federal floors” for policy, below which no states can go. State courts, in turn, can raise the level of this floor. Thus, both federal and state cou…
Presidential Selection of Supreme Court Nominees: The Characteristics Approach
Despite the importance of every nomination to the Supreme Court, a unified theory that illuminates presidential selection of nominees across the modern political era remains elusive. We propose a new theory — the “characteristics approach” — that envisions nominees as bundles of characteristics, such as ideology, policy reliability, and attributes of diversity. We formalize the theory, which emphasizes the political returns to presidents from a n…
From Textbook Pluralism to Modern Hyperpluralism: Interest Groups and Supreme Court Nominations, 1930–2017
We examine interest group involvement in Supreme Court nominations from 1930 to 2017, finding dramatic shifts in the number and type of groups, as well as their choice of tactics. Whereas the early period was dominated by labor unions, “core” civil rights groups, and groups affiliated with the “old right,” the modern period is dominated by public interest/citizen groups and “identity” groups. We also find a shift from more traditional “inside” ta…
The Revolving Door in Judicial Politics: Former Clerks and Agenda Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court
We examine the role of former clerks to Supreme Court justices on the Court’s agenda setting process. We find that when a former clerk is the attorney on either a cert petition or an amicus brief, the Court is more likely to hear a case, compared to advocacy by a non-former clerk. To help explain these patterns, we draw on the broader literature on “revolving door” politics. We argue that the most plausible mechanisms are either that former clerk…
The politics of accountability in Supreme Court nominations: Voter Recall and Assessment of Senator Votes on Nominees
While longstanding theories of political behavior argue that voters do not possess sufficient political knowledge to hold their elected representatives accountable, recent revisionist studies challenge this view, arguing that voters can both follow how their representatives vote and use that information intelligently. We apply the revisionist account to the study of Supreme Court nominations in the modern era. Using survey data on the nominations…
A theory of policy sabotage
We develop a theory of policymaking that examines when policy sabotage—the deliberate choice by an opposition party to interfere with the implementation of a policy—can be an effective electoral strategy, even if rational voters can observe that it is happening. In our model, a potential saboteur chooses whether to sabotage an incumbent’s policy by blocking its successful implementation. A voter then decides whether to retain the incumbent, who i…
Is the U.S. Supreme Court Facing a Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy? A Review Article
Kevin McMahon's A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other examines the extent to which the current Supreme Court—and its conservative supermajority—departs from earlier courts in the extent to which it suffers from a “democracy gap.” McMahon persuasively argues that the current Court is different for two reasons. First, most of the justices in the conservative majority were appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote and/or were confirmed by …
The Supreme Court: How Did We Get Here? And What Comes Next
The politics of appointments have transformed the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years. We examine why and how the current conservative supermajority on the court came to be, with a particular focus on how this court stands apart from earlier ones. We trace the factors that allowed President Donald Trump to reshape the court with his three appointments in his first term and evaluate the importance of the conservative supermajority by connecting it …
Law (26 works) · Political science (26 works) · Law (21 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (16 works) · Supreme court (15 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (14 works) · Law and economics (10 works) · Sociology (10 works)