The Politics of Scandals: The Case of Supreme Court Nominations
نویسندگان
چکیده
We examine the role of scandals in the politics of Supreme Court nominations, 1877-1994. We argue that when a nominee’s opponents control the process, they often delay it in the hope of uncovering a scandal. If they succeed in finding a scandal, they further delay the process in order to exploit the scandal and damage the nominee’s prospects of confirmation. Evidence from a Markov model of the confirmation process, estimated on weekly data on the emergence of scandals, supports this view. We then examine the impact of scandals on roll call voting. Scandals reduce support for a nominee among the President’s co-partisans, though modestly. But they galvanize opposition among the President’s partisan opponents, especially in tandem with divided party government. We then estimate the expected aggregate support for nominees, in the presence and absence of scandals, given the size of the president’s majority in the Senate. Scandal-wracked nominations face a substantial chance of failure, but only in periods of divided government. These findings suggest some lessons about the strategic, partisan manipulation of scandals during periods of ideological tension in American government. “The Judiciary Committee . . . began a rousing search into all the dark abodes of scandal and tattle, to hunt for something against the character of the President’s nominee.” New York Times, July 21, 1888, on the nomination of Melville Fuller to Chief Justice
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