Delaying Justice(s): A Duration Analysis of Supreme Court Confirmations

Abstract

Presidents traditionally have had great success when nominating justices to the Supreme Court, with confirmation being the norm and rejection being the rare exception. While the confirmation process usually ends with the nominee taking a seat on the Court, however, there is a great deal of variance in the amount of time it takes the Senate to act. To derive a theoretical explanation of this underlying dynamic in the confirmation process, we draw on a spatial model of presidential nominations to the Court. We then employ a hazard model to test this explanation, using data on all Supreme Court nominations and confirmations since the end of the Civil War. Our primary finding is that the duration of the confirmation process increases as the ideological distance between the president and the Senate increases. We also find evidence that suggests that the duration increases for critical nominees and chief justices and decreases for older nominees, current and previous senators, and nominees with prior experience on state and federal district courts.

Institutional Effects on the Careers of State Supreme Court Justices

“…Political scientists have utilized event history models to examine temporally-ordered data in myriad contexts, (see Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004; Box-Steffensmeier and Zorn 2001), including Cox hazard models in research on judicial politics (see, e.g., Curry and Hurwitz N.d.; Langer et al 2003;Shipan and Shannon 2003). Our research examining the duration of state supreme court justices' tenure is methodologically analogous to these studies.…”

The Confirmation Obstacle Course: Signaling Opposition through Delay

“…Ruckman (1993) distinguished "critical nominations" as those replacing a judge of the opposite party, particularly when such a replacement would have a greater impact on the overall ideological composition of the Supreme Court. Shipan and Shannon (2003) similarly defined "critical nominations" as those that would have a substantial influence on the partisan balance of the Supreme Court, finding that such nominations experienced increased delay in the confirmation process. Binder and Maltzman (2002) found that confirmation delay was greater for circuit court nominees who would shift the partisan balance of an evenly divided circuit, at least during periods of divided government.…”

The Politics of Senatorial Confirmations: A Comparative Study of Argentina and Brazil

“…By examining the duration of the confirmation process -that is, the number of calendar days extending from the president's nomination to the Senate's confirmation of the nominee -these studies have proved that there exists considerable variation in the length of the processes to confirm them (Hartley and Holmes 2002;McCarty and Razaghian 1999;Stratmann and Garner 2004;Shipan and Shannon 2003). The underlying idea of these works is that increases in the length of the selection process reflect the additional time that presidents spend negotiating, bargaining or simply consulting with senators over the final choice of nominees.…”

“…Conclusions diverge considerably on which of the three types of explanations are more suitable to understand confirmation processes not only because these studies differ in their object of study (some are concerned with supreme court nominations, others with lower courts or executive branch nominations, etc. ), but also because the models usually include different vari-how unknown they are for the Senate, their qualifications for the position, their age, gender, ethnic or racial origin and, finally, their ideology or policy preferences (Martinek et al 2002;Nixon 2004;Shipan and Shannon 2003). This line of research explores, for instance, whether increasing candidate quality makes confirmation more likely and decreases the duration of the confirmation process; or similarly, whether the confirmation of women and ethnic minority nominees face more obstacles and delays than other confirmations.…”

“…However, most of the studies focus on the other two groups of explanations: political factors and institutional features (Binder and Maltzman 2002;Hartley and Holmes 2002;Martinek et al 2002;McCarty and Razaghian 1999;Shipan and Shannon 2003;Stratmann and Garner 2004). From this point of view, it is examined, first, whether the strength of the political opposition in the upper chamber and the partisan composition of the senate committees are likely to affect confirmation processes: delays will occur in case of divided government and, particularly, when parties are polarized (McCarty and Razaghian 1999;Shipan and Shannon 2003) or, in other words, the Senate will proceed more slowly as it diverges ideologically from the president (Binder and Maltzman 2002).…”