Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees

Kastellec, Jonathan P.; Lax, Jeffrey R.; Phillips, Justin

doi:10.1017/s0022381610000150

Cited by 74 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…MRP is a technique presented by Gelman and Little (1997), validated by Park, Gelman, and Bafumi (2006) and Lax and Phillips (2009a), and extended in Berkman and Plutzer (2005), Lax and Phillips (2009b), and Kastellec, Lax, and Phillips (2010), inter alia. It has been shown to produce highly accurate estimates even with a single national poll and simple demographic-geographic models (simpler than we use herein).…”

Section: Responsiveness Vs Congruencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Democratic Deficit in the States

Lax

Phillips

2011

American J Political Sci

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394

454

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One might worry, however, that this test is too lenient. The ideology-policy correlation is the dominant approach in studies of state responsiveness, and it has been the most fruitful approach to date. However, problems of inference arise because researchers cannot know exactly how diffuse preference measures ought to translate into policy. That is, policy and ideology lack a common metric (Erikson, Wright, and McIver 1993, 93;Matsusaka 2001 but without knowing the mapping of ideology to voter policy preferences, we cannot tell if policy is over-or underresponsive to preferences.Most existing work, by focusing on the ideologypolicy correlation, also does not assess how responsive states are to voter preferences on specific policies. Nor does it tell us how effective state political systems are at translating opinion majorities into public policy. If a majority of voters in a state wants to adopt a lottery or impose an abortion restriction, how likely is the state to do so? In other words, is policy usually congruent with majority will?Both responsiveness and congruence are forms of policy representation, but they capture different dimensions of democratic performance. To be clear, by responsiveness, we mean a positive correlation between opinion and policy; by congruence, we mean that policy actually matches majority opinion. Where majority will is truly sovereign, you would expect both strong responsiveness and a high level of congruence. Policy adoption may increase with higher public support (suggesting responsiveness), but policy may still often be inconsistent with majority opinion (suggesting a lack of congruence),

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Section: Responsiveness Vs Congruencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Democratic Deficit in the States

Lax

Phillips

2011

American J Political Sci

Self Cite

394

454

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“…Measures for subnational units cannot be estimated by disaggregating the national survey data, as there are only very few observations for some cantons (Levendusky et al, 2008;Warshaw and Rodden, 2012). Thus, we take advantage of recent developments in survey research by using multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP), which provides good estimates, even when the samples for individual subnational units are small (Gelman and Little, 1997;Park et al, 2004;Phillips, 2009a,b, 2012;Warshaw and Rodden, 2012;Kastellec et al, 2010;Pacheco, 2012;Tausanovitch and Warshaw, 2013). MRP estimates the preferences of small constituencies in four steps.…”

Section: Measuring Voters' and Elites' Policy Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Democratic Effect of Direct Democracy

Leemann

Wasserfallen

2016

Am Polit Sci Rev

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A key requirement of democratic governance is that policy outcomes and the majority preference of the electorate are congruent. Many studies argue that the more direct democratic a system is, the more often voters get what they want, but the empirical evidence is mixed. This analysis explores the democratic effect of initiatives and referendums theoretically and empirically. The prediction of the formal model is that "bad" representation (i.e., a large preference deviation between the electorate and the political elite) is good for the democratic effect of direct democracy. An empirical investigation of original voter and elite survey data, analyzed with multilevel modeling and post-stratification, supports this argument. Building on the literature, the findings of the analysis suggest that the extent to which direct democratic institutions are conducive for policy congruence-and may thus be advisable as democratic correctives to representative systems-depends on the political conflict structure.

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“…Kastellec et al (2010) concluded that senators respond to state-level opinion in confirmation votes. This claim ties the Court, a potentially countermajoritarian institution, to majority will.…”

Section: Constituencies and Legislators: Theory And Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the outcomes of many votes are ambiguous or obscured in procedural detail, the result of a vote on a Supreme Court nomination is stark. From a research design perspective, public opinion can vary widely across states and nominees and has been shown to influence senatorial voting on nominees (Kastellec, Lax, and Phillips 2010). Thus, we are not looking for a disparate impact where no impact of opinion exists at all.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%