Amy Steigerwalt

Sounding the Fire Alarm: The Role of Interest Groups in the Lower Federal Court Confirmation Process

Traditionally, lower federal court nominations were confirmed swiftly and unanimously by the Senate. However, increasingly, lower court confirmations have become lengthy and contentious proceedings. Traditional explanations for this shift have centered on the temporal political environment and the ideological extremism of the nominees. We propose an alternative theory to explain this phenomenon: interest group opposition. We posit that interest groups sound “fire alarms”—raising the salience of a lower court nomination—thereby forcing senators politically aligned with the groups to abandon the senators’ default positions (confirm swiftly) and instead give the opposed nominee thorough consideration and perhaps even block confirmation all together. Our theory is supported by exclusive interview testimony from key players in judicial confirmation politics. We also test our theory using data on all U.S. Courts of Appeals nominations, 1985–2004. We find interest group opposition far eclipses previous explanations about lower court confirmation outcomes and timing.

Different houses: the distribution of earmarks in the U.S. House and Senate

Nearly all studies of pork-barrel politics in the U.S. Congress focus on the House, biasing our conception of how politics influences federal spending and skewing our attention toward factors that are active in the House. This article highlights differences between the Senate and House in how pork is allocated. We identify four important differences between the House and Senate, generate hypotheses regarding how each difference should influence the distribution of pork projects, and test these hypotheses using data from earmarks in the Appropriations bills passed by the two chambers for fiscal year 2008. The results support three of our four hypotheses, suggesting that senators are driven by different motivations than House members. These results imply that theoretical accounts of pork-barrel spending need to account for these interchamber differences. Our findings also highlight how studies of legislative behavior, more generally, need to account for important differences in legislative structure and organization.