Pivotal Vacancies, Partisan Regimes, and Supreme Court Ideology

Abstract

A sizable literature offers that presidents can alter Supreme Court ideology and decision making through their appointments. Nonetheless, such influence is quite uneven and uncertain when it comes to individual presidents and individual appointments. I seek to improve our understanding of the contingencies of presidential influence on Court ideology by expanding on Krehbiel's move-the-median model, focusing on pivotal vacancies in which the departing justice is on the opposite side of the Court median from the president and Senate majority.