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How Political Contestation Over Judicial Nominations Polarizes Americans’ Attitudes Toward the Supreme Court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2019

Jon C. Rogowski Open the ORCID record for Jon C. Rogowski [Opens in a new window]  and
Andrew R. Stone
Jon C. Rogowski*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Harvard University
Andrew R. Stone
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Harvard University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: rogowski@fas.harvard.edu
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Abstract

Contemporary US Supreme Court nominations are unavoidably and inevitably political. Although observers worry that political contestation over nominations undermines support for qualified nominees and threatens the Court's legitimacy, there is little empirical evidence to support these claims. The authors argue that political contestation over judicial nominations provides cues that shape the public's impressions about nominees and the Court and polarizes public opinion across partisan lines. Data from a conjoint experiment administered in the first days of the Trump presidency support this argument. Political rhetoric attributed to President Trump and Senate Democrats substantially polarized partisans’ views of nominees and evaluations of the Court's legitimacy, with Republicans (Democrats) expressing significantly more (less) favorable attitudes. Additional analyses suggest that contestation generates divergent partisan responses by affecting views about the nominee's impartiality. These findings challenge existing perspectives that depict attitudes toward the judiciary as resistant to partisan considerations and have important implications for the Court's legitimacy in a polarized era.

Keywords

conjoint experimentjudicial legitimacyjudicial nominationspolarizationpublic opinion and courts
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 1251 - 1269
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Supplementary material: Link

Rogowski and Stone Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OXIOI9
Link
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Rogowski and Stone supplementary material

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