Buyer Beware? Presidential Success through Supreme Court Appointments

Abstract

One manner in which Presidents attempt to have an enduring policy influence is through the appointment of like-minded justices to the Supreme Court. This article empirically examines Dahl's (1957) hypothesis that justices actually support the policy preferences of the Presidents who appoint them. We study concordance with new data for measuring presidential preferences in the domains of social and economic policy and by incorporating the notion of judicial change over time. We measure presidential preferences for the modern Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton, with a survey taken from a random sample of political science scholars who study the Presidency We measure the voting behavior of the President's Supreme Court appointees through their votes in civil liberties and economics cases from 1937 to 1994. Presidents appear to be reasonably successful in their appointments in the short run, but justices on average appear to deviate over time away from the Presidents who appointed them.

Keepers of the Covenant or Platonic Guardians? Decision Making on the U.S. Supreme Court

“…The results, whether using the Segal and Cover (1989) scores (Segal, Epstein, Cameron, & Spaeth, 1995), Baum (1988Baum ( , 1989Baum ( , 1992 adjusted scores, or Martin and Quinn (2002), yield comparable results. Similarly, we tried two separate measures of presidential liberalism- Segal, Timpone, and Howard (2000) and Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson (2002)with no significant changes in the coefficients.…”

International Conflicts and Decision Making on the Federal District Courts

“…Democratic judges are indeed more liberal on the bench than their Republican counterparts" (1999:243). This corroborates the fact that, with some notable exceptions, presidents are successful at appointing like-minded judges to the federal bench who render decisions consistent with the policy goals of their appointing presidents (e.g., Carp, Manning, and Stidham, 2004;Segal, Timpone, and Howard, 2000).…”

The Effects of Information on the Accuracy of Presidential Assessments of Supreme Court Nominee Preferences

“…Their common space NOM-INATE scores are scales of all non-unanimous votes, adjusted to make them comparable across congresses and presidents. Finally, Segal, Timpone and Howard (2000) surveyed all members of the presidential studies section of the American Political Science Association, asking them to rate presidents on separate scales for social and economic liberalism. Since all three variables are indicators of the same concept, and each presumably contains a certain degree of measurement error, we constructed a summated ratings scale of all three concepts.…”

“…For example, a president who does not pay too much attention to social issues might not consider a potential nominee' s THE EFFECTS OF INFORMATION preferences along a social dimension. Therefore, we included a measure of the appointing president' s salience for social issues using the survey of presidential scholars described in Segal, Timpone, and Howard (2000). 3 The measure ranges from 0-100, with higher scores indicating more salience.…”