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The Role of Nominee Gender and Race at U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Christina L. Boyd ,
Paul M. Collins Jr.  and
Lori A. Ringhand
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Abstract

We investigate an unexplored aspect of the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation process: whether questioning senators treat female and minority nominees differently from male and white nominees. Applying out-group theory, we argue that senators will ask female and minority nominees more questions about their “judicial philosophies” in an effort to determine their competence to serve on the Court. This out-group bias is likely to be exacerbated for nominees not sharing the senator's political party. Our results do not support racial differences, but they do provide strong evidence that female nominees receive more judicial philosophy-related questions from male senators. This effect is enhanced when the female nominee does not share the partisan affiliation of the questioning senator. Together, these findings indicate that female nominees undergo a substantively different confirmation process than male nominees. We further find that this effect may be most intense with nominees like Justice Sotomayor, whose identities align with more than one out-group.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 871 - 901
Copyright
© 2018 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

We are thankful to Amy Steigerwalt, Susan Sterett, the anonymous reviewers, and participants at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association and the 2017 UMass Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Colloquium. Collins and Ringhand thank the Dirksen Congressional Center for a research grant that partially funded the data used in this project. We also extend our gratitude to Bryce McManus for his excellent assistance on this project. The data used for this project are available at https://blogs.umass.edu/pmcollins/data/.

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