Chad Westerland

The Changing Dynamics of Senate Voting on Supreme Court Nominees

A near-universal consensus exists that the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987 triggered a new regime in the Senates voting over presidential nominees—a regime that deemphasizes ethics, competence, and integrity and stresses instead politics, philosophy, and ideology. Nonetheless, this conventional wisdom remains largely untested. In this paper we explore the extent to which the Bork nomination has affected the decisions of U.S. senators. To do so, we modernize, update, and backdate the standard account of confirmation politics offered by Cameron, Cover, and Segal (1990) to cover all candidates for the Supreme Court from Hugo L. Black in 1937 through John G. Roberts, Jr. in 2005. Our results confirm conventional wisdom about the Bork nomination but with two notable caveats. First, while the importance of ideology has reached new heights, the Senates emphasis on this factor had its genesis some three decades earlier, in the 1950s. Second, while ideology is of paramount concern to senators, a candidates professional merit also remains a significant determinant of success in the Senate.

All Along the Watchtower: Acculturation Fear, Anti-Latino Affect, and Immigration

In this article, we consider how the factors driving Anglo attitudes toward immigration changed in the post-9/11 era. We argue that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the immigration issue became nationalized, framed in a threat context. In this context, acculturation fear and anti-Latino sentiment are strong predictors of restrictionist sentiment; in the pre-9/11 period, these factors have little substantive impact on Anglo attitudes. We theorize that the current climate has helped ‘‘activate’’ social identities, which in turn has deleterious consequences for the Latinos in the United States. Using data from the 2000 and 2004 National Election Studies, we estimate a model of Anglo immigration attitudes. We show indicators of acculturation fear, anti-Latino sentiment, and media exposure significantly relate to Anglo immigration attitudes in the post-9/11 period but not the pre-9/11 period.