The Senatorial Courtesy Game: Explaining the Norm of Informal Vetoes in Advice and Consent Nominations

Jacobi, Tonja

doi:10.3162/036298005x201518

Cited by 15 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The results also have implications for our understanding of constraints on the president's ability to move the bench towards his preferences. Jacobi (2005) argues that senatorial courtesy (protected through the blue slip) can impose a check on the president's appointment power by shaping the range of nominees that the Senate will confirm. Our results lend some caution to Jacobi's conclusion.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Johnson and Roberts (2005) and Rohde and Shepsle (2007), for example, provide formal treatments of the impact of the filibuster pivot on Supreme Court appointments and confirmation. In contrast, Jacobi (2005) proposes a model in which one of the two home‐state senators for each lower court appointment can exploit senatorial courtesy to block appointments in their state 3 . Conditional on the distribution of senators' intensity of interest in the judgeship, Jacobi argues that the president is compelled to select a nominee whom the home‐state senator prefers to the status quo.…”

Section: Existing Models Of Advice and Consentmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Who Consents? Competing Pivots in Federal Judicial Selection

Primo

Binder

Maltzman

2008

American J Political Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

S tudents of American politics have applied considerable energy in recent years to explaining the politics of advice and consent under the U.S. Constitution. Spatial models of advice and consent have offered an analytically precise way to think about the impact of senators' and presidents' policy preferences on the selection and confirmation of presidential appointees.1 For those studies that examine appointments to the federal courts, most models treat the Senate as a unitary actor governed by the Senate median or focus on a particular veto player within the chamber.2 These studies often find that accounting for the preferences of an additional pivot beyond the Senate median can be consequential for our understanding of confirmation outcomes.Formal Senate rules and informal practices, however, extend blocking authority to a wide range of senators beyond the Senate median and a single other pivotal senator. When the Senate considers nominations to the The authors wish to thank Shelly Goldman, Eric Lawrence, Keith Krehbiel, Larry Rothenberg, and Chuck Shipan for comments and advice, and Matt Jacobsmeier, Alan Murphy, and Molly Reynolds for research assistance. 2 Studies that highlight the Senate median include Krehbiel (2007) and Moraski and Shipan (1999). Studies that isolate the impact of a particular veto point include Wright (1998), Cameron, Cover, andSegal (1990) federal bench, formal and informal rules dictate that nominees must secure the consent of multiple potential veto players-including committee and party medians, as well as home-state senators for the court vacancy and the senators capable of sustaining a filibuster against confirmation. In this article, we seek a richer theoretical understanding of the forces that shape confirmation contests, elaborating competing spatial models that incorporate the preferences of pivotal players in isolation as well as in different combinations. We apply the lessons of our theoretical findings to confirmation outcomes for the U.S. Courts of Appeals and the U.S. District Courts between 1975 and 2006. We find that rules and practices that endow majority parties with agenda-setting advantages in executive session and that require supermajorities to cut off debate are most consequential for explaining patterns of confirmation outcomes over the past three decades. These veto powers typically outstrip the informal

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Existing Models Of Advice and Consentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Consents? Competing Pivots in Federal Judicial Selection

Primo

Binder

Maltzman

2008

American J Political Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…] [that] created competition between kings and thepope over political control. 44 Weingast (2002) observes 42 Cited in Shepsle (2006a), referring to Maltzman and Binder (2005) and Jacobi (2005). Moreover, while the church promoted institutions that tended to demote economic growth (in order to maintain its influence and dominance over monarchies), kings tended to design institutions that promoted economic growth as a way to take the church's weight off their shoulders.…”

Section: Institutions Enhance Perfectly Rational Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frameworks for Modeling Cognition and Decisions in Institutional Environments

Vallbé¹

2015

Law, Governance and Technology Series

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Law-Governance and Technology Series is intended to attract manuscripts arising from an interdisciplinary approach in law, artificial intelligence and information technologies. The idea is to bridge the gap between research in IT law and ITapplications for lawyers developing a unifying techno-legal perspective. The series will welcome proposals that have a fairly specific focus on problems or projects that will lead to innovative research charting the course for new interdisciplinary developments in law, legal theory, and law and society research as well as in computer technologies, artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences. In broad strokes, manuscripts for this series may be mainly located in the fields of the Internet law (data protection, intellectual property, Internet rights, etc.), Computational models of the legal contents and legal

show abstract

“…The "blue slips" model refers to an informal norm in the Senate Judiciary Committee that allows home-state senators to veto the appointments (Jacobi 2005). Thus, if an appointee hails from Virginia, the two Virginia senators have a say over whether the appointment goes through (Primo, Binder, and Maltzman 2008).…”

Section: Approaches To Appointment Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The pioneering theories posited that congressional preferences systematically influenced the nature of judicial appointees. In subsequent efforts, scholars developed refined theories of congressional influence, focusing variously on specific Senate institutions: for example, the “blue slip” practice (Jacobi ), the floor median (Moraski and Shipan ), the filibuster (Rohde and Shepsle ), and the majority party (Cox and McCubbins ; Primo, Binder, and Maltzman )…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Appointment Politics and the Ideological Composition of the Judiciary

Stiglitz

2014

Legislative Studies Qtrly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Scholars have advanced a wide range of theories regarding the role of Senate confirmation in judicial appointments. In this article, I directly test the predictions of these models using a novel measure of the ideology of judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. The main results indicate that the filibuster and majority party have predominated in appointment politics. Prompted by recent events, I also conduct a simulation‐based exercise to examine the ideological composition of the judiciary under a confirmation regime in which the filibuster is not present. This exercise suggests that the Senate filibuster induces moderation in judicial appointments; the elimination of the filibuster is likely to result in a more contentious, if less dilatory, confirmation process and a more polarized judiciary.

show abstract

The Senatorial Courtesy Game: Explaining the Norm of Informal Vetoes in Advice and Consent Nominations

Cited by 15 publications

References 14 publications

Who Consents? Competing Pivots in Federal Judicial Selection

Who Consents? Competing Pivots in Federal Judicial Selection

Frameworks for Modeling Cognition and Decisions in Institutional Environments

Appointment Politics and the Ideological Composition of the Judiciary

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About