The Supreme Court's Partisan Composition Affects How Americans Evaluate Nominees

Abstract

Amidst increasing politicization of the U.S. Supreme Court, researchers have shown that public opinion toward nominees strongly influences Senate confirmation votes. However, current studies fail to consider how the existing Court itself affects the public's preferences for nominees. Instead, they assume that Americans evaluate nominees as individuals in a vacuum. Using a preregistered conjoint experiment, we demonstrate that the existing Court’s partisan composition affects how Americans evaluate the prospective ninth Justice. Specifically, we find that a nominee's partisanship becomes less salient when one's own party already dominates the Court, but more salient when the Court is split or when the other party dominates. Our findings suggest important implications for judicial politics, as well as the broader literature on partisan polarization.

Keywords: Supreme Court, judicial politics, partisanship, polarization, public opinion, survey experiment, conjoint analysis

JEL Classification: D70, D72, D91, K00, K40, K49