Race, electoral pressure, expected judicial ideology, and the vote to confirm Justice Clarence Thomas

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe paper “Courting Constituents? An Analysis of the Senate Confirmation Vote on Justice Clarence Thomas” tests the theory that electoral pressure from Black constituents played a role in the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court (Overby, L. Marvin, Beth M. Henschen, Michael H. Walsh, and Julie Strauss. 1992. “Courting Constituents? An Analysis of the Senate Confirmation Vote on Justice Clarence Thomas.” American Political Science Review 86 (4): 997–1003. https://do.org/10.2307/1964351). This paper reveals several methodological errors in the original paper and also provides a friendly critique of several of the underlying assumptions put forth in the 1992 paper. This paper then offers an alternative explanation that the expected judicial ideology of Clarence Thomas nomination was relatively more important than electoral pressure from Black voters.KEYWORDS: Supreme courtraceattitudinal modeldescriptive representationconfirmation votes AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Jonathan Spiegler, Isaac Unah, Elizabeth Menninga, Jonathan Green, Simon Hoellerbauer, Anthony Chergosky, Ryan Williams, Mary Willis Bode, Apurba Chakraborty, John Lappie, Jason Roberts, Jeffery Jenkins, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers for their comments and suggestions on this paper. I would also like to acknowedge Lyle Overby, Beth Henschen, Michael Walsh, and Julie Strauss for their important contribution to this area of study.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 In the case of the party variable, Republican senators are coded “-1” instead of “0”; senators not up for reelection are coded “-1” instead of “0.”2 While using much more recent data after the parties' electoral coalitions have shifted, Badas and Simas (Citation2021) demonstrate that Court appointments may be more important to Republican voters than it is to Democratic voters.3 For Sotomayor and Kagan, the authors use data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), while for Thomas, they use data from the American National Election Study: Pooled Senate Election Study (ASES).4 For recent nominees, see: http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/polisci/jsegal/QualTable.pdf.5 This idea of deference is similar to Stimson's (Citation2018, 22) notion of a “zone of acquiescence” for voters, who push back when the president proposes policies outside this zone. In the same way, in this era of Supreme Court nominees, a potential justice who was viewed as wholly outside the mainstream drew more opposition than the slightly more moderate Clarence Thomas. Admittedly, political elites do not behave the exact same way as mass publics, but I argue that the analogy used by Stimson is relatively analogous to the process of advise and consent in the partisan, but not as partisan as today 1980s and 1990.6 DW-Nominate Scores (see www.voteview.com) have the advantage of being calculated with all non-unanimous roll call votes. Importantly, these scores measure the ideology of senators' voting records, which may be a result of a number of factors beyond a senator's own preferences.