Change and Continuity in Citizens’ Evaluations of Supreme Court Nominees

• Author: Richard L. Vining,Rachel Bitecofer
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221119402
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(1) 57–68

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221119402

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Change and Continuity in Citizens’Evaluations

of Supreme Court Nominees

Richard L. Vining, Jr

1

and Rachel Bitecofer

2

Abstract

In the 1980s and 1990s, supporters of Supreme Court nominees tended to characterize their views in non-ideological terms

while opponents relied more on ideological justif‌ications. Since then, the judicial appointment process has been increasingly

entangled with partisan conf‌lict. Given the heightened focus on nominees’ideological preferences, we expect that citizens are

now more likely to rely on political over apolitical justif‌ications, even if they support the nominee. We use data from a telephone

survey in 2017 after the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to test this proposition. We f‌ind that contemporary citizens rely

more frequently on political justif‌ications for their support of nominees than then they did in the Reagan-Bush era. Opponents

remain more likely to invoke political orientations, but the disparity has declined. The f‌indings reveal both change and continuity

in citizens’evaluations of Supreme Court nominees.

Keywords

judicial nominations, judicial politics, judicial selection, public opinion, supreme court

Following each modern nomination to the Supreme Court

of the United States, polling f‌irms and media outlets release

af‌lurry of survey results capturing public response to the

potential justice.

1

These poll results contribute to the

broader narrative about the nominee and assist prognos-

ticators to predict the nominee’s treatment by the Senate

Judiciary Committee and the full Senate. Commentary

about such polls typically fails to investigate citizens’

explanations for support or opposition. When crosstabs are

provided, they tend to focus on partisan differences or

support for the president. Although aggregate polling re-

sults are interesting and potentially inf‌luential, they ob-

scure underlying trends in how Americans perceive,

discuss, and evaluate the judiciary. Political scientists have

taken the dynamics of public opinion about Supreme Court

nominees more seriously (Badas & Stauffer, 2018;Gibson

& Caldeira, 2011;Gimpel & Wolpert,1995;Sen, 2017)but

tend to focus on predictors of support or opposition per se

rather than citizens’explanations for their stances. We

argue that understanding how citizens evaluate Supreme

Court nominees, including whether they emphasize po-

litical or apolitical factors, provides valuable insight re-

garding popular expectations and perceptions of the

Supreme Court and federal judiciary. In addition, we argue

that how citizens evaluate potential justices has shifted

over time as courts and the conf‌irmation process are in-

creasingly politicized (Armaly, 2018;Rogowski & Stone,

2021).

In order to examine how citizens justify their conf‌irmation

preferences in the contemporary era, we commissioned an

original, live-telephone, random probability sampling survey

of 957 citizens conducted in February and early March of

2017 while the Senate consider ed Neil Gorsuch’s nomination

to the Supreme Court. Respondents were asked whether they

supported or opposed Gorsuch’s nomination and then asked

to explain their positions. In order to examine change over

time we replicated questions in the survey analyzed by

Gimpel and Ringel (1995) in their study of public evalua -

tions of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas during their

conf‌irmation processes. They found that in the mid-1980s

and early 1990s supporters of conf‌irmation generally ex-

plained their position wit h apolitical arguments whil e op-

ponents were more likely to characterize their opposition in

ideological terms. Repli cating their analytical s trategy al-

lows us to determine how citizens characterize their support

or opposition to Gorsuch’s nomination. In addition, we are

able to test whether popula r evaluations of Supreme Co urt

nominees have changed since the Ronald Reagan and

1

Department of Political Science, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

2

Strike PAC, Eugene, OR, USA

Corresponding Author:

Richard L. Vining, Jr., Political Science, University of Georgia, 180 Baldwin

Hall, Athens, GA 30602, USA.

Email: rvining@uga.edu