Confirmation Delay for Vacancies on the Circuit Courts of Appeals

Supreme Court confirmation is an exhaustively studied phenomenon, but lower court confirmation is less well understood, in part because lower court nominees are very rarely rejected, and the Senate fails even to hold a recorded vote for most appointees. However, the length of time it takes to fill a judicial vacancy serves as alternate evidence of conflict between the president and the Senate. We present an empirical assessment of appellate vacancy conflict, based on a continuous time-proportional hazard model of vacancy duration. Our results demonstrate that female and minority candidates are confirmed only after unusually long vacancies, and this has nothing to do with the qualifications of the nominees. Our results also demonstrate that institutional and partisan conflict between the Senate and the White House drive the confirmation process for the federal appeals courts, but delay tactics employed by the Senate are only partially strategic.