Charles R. Shipan

The politics of Supreme Court nominations: A theory of institutional constraints and choices

When a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court, the president can attempt to use his power of nomination strategically in order to bring the Court in line with his own policy preferences. However, the president faces two constraints when attempting to do so. First, he may be constrained by the presence of continuing justices and the existing Court median. Second, he may be constrained by the Senate, which must approve his nominee. In this paper we develop and test a theory that examines the conditions under which a president is constrained in his choice of a nominee. Our results show that presidents can, and do, behave strategically with respect to Supreme Court nominations.

Legislatures and statutory control of bureaucracy

Existing theories of legislative delegation to bureaucracies typically focus on a single legislature, often the U.S. Congress. We argue that this parochial focus has important limitations. If one contends that politicians respond rationally to their political environment when adopting strategies for controlling bureaucrats, then theories of control should be able to explain how differences in the political environment-and in particular in the democratic institutional arrangements that shape this environment-influence strategies for controlling bureaucrats. We offer such a theory about the conditions under which legislatures should rely on statutory control (i.e., detailed legislation) in order to limit the discretion of agencies. The theory focuses on the interactions of four factors: conflict between legislators and bureaucrats, the bargaining costs associated with choosing the institutions for controlling bureaucrats, the professional capacity of legislators to create institutions for control, and the impact of political institutions on the relative costs and benefits of statutory and nonstatutory strategies of control. We test our argument using legislation from 1995 and 1996 that affects Medicaid programs. The results show that legislatures are more likely to make use of statutory controls when control of government is divided between the two parties, the two chambers of the legislature are unified in their opposition to the executive, the legislature is more professionalized, and the legislature does not have easily available options for nonstatutory control. ureaucratic involvement in policymaking is a pervasive condition of modern political life. Bureaucracies implement policies that legislatures have enacted, and they create policies where legislatures have avoided doing so. They can act to regulate industries, to distribute benefits and costs, and to redistribute wealth. They tackle policy areas as disparate as telecommunications, the environment, transportation, and public health. Given the pervasiveness of bureaucratic activity, it is not surprising that political scientists long have sought to understand the relationship between legislatures and agencies. Understanding this relationship is essential to democratic theory, as it focuses attention on the legitimacy of the role played by unelected policymakers in a representative democracy. Furthermore, it sheds light on the actions, abilities, and motivations of legislators. Thus, scholars have attempted to ascertain whether, to what extent, and under what conditions legislators influence the actions of agencies. Much of the focus of this research has been on the U.S. Congress, and much of the debate has centered on the question of whether in fact Congress controls the bureaucracy. This is a difficult question to answer, as it requires fairly precise information on legislator preferences and agency outputs. But while settling the empirical issue has been difficult, in addressing this question scholars have clarified several strategies for control, including the use of budget processes (e.g., Banks 1989; Bendor, Taylor, and Van Gaalen 1987), ongoing oversight (e.g., Aberbach 1990), and statutory control, whereby legislators use legislation to influence agency decisions.

The Diffusion of Policy Diffusion Research in Political Science

Over the past fifty years, top political science journals have published hundreds of articles about policy diffusion. This article reports on network analyses of how the ideas and approaches in these articles have spread both within and across the subfields of American politics, comparative politics and international relations. Then, based on a survey of the literature, the who, what, when, where, how and why of policy diffusion are addressed in order to identify and assess some of the main contributions and omissions in current scholarship. It is argued that studies of diffusion would benefit from paying more attention to developments in other subfields and from taking a more systematic approach to tackling the questions of when and how policy diffusion takes place.

Environmental Policy and Party Divergence in Congress

The question of whether parties converge or diverge over time has attracted a great deal of theoretical and empirical attention. In this article we make two contributions to this literature. First, rather than looking at general measures of ideology, we examine a specific policy area-environmental policy to see whether the parties have diverged or converged. We utilize ratings produced by the League of Conservation Voters to obtain measures of congressional voting. Unlike other issue-specific studies of divergence, we adjust these scores, using a methodology recently developed by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder (1999), to make them comparable across time. Our results show that Republicans and Democrats in Congress have diverged over time on environmental issues. Second, once we determine that the parties have diverged, we analyze the underlying causes of this divergence. We provide three explanations for divergence between the two parties, based on the fact that parties are not monolithic but rather are made up of regional, factional, and individual components. If regions behave differently on an issue, then shifting representation of regions within parties will lead to shifts in overall party behavior. When internal factions with stronger views than the general party are more supported by interest groups and less constrained by issue salience or economic conditions, then the parties are more likely to diverge. And when party members are replaced by individuals with different views on an issue, overall party behavior shifts accordingly.

Regulatory Regimes, Agency Actions, and the Conditional Nature of Congressional Influence

Political bureaucracies make the overwhelming majority of public policy decisions in the United States. To examine the extent to which these agency actions are responsive to the preferences of elected officials, in particular, Congress, I develop a spatial model of oversight. The most important insight of this theory is that agencies make policy decisions within given regimes and may be constrained by the preferences of different political actors at different times. To test the theory, I collect and analyze data on the monitoring activities of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I find that under certain conditions, the FDA is responsive to the preferences of committees and floors in Congress, but under other conditions the agency can act autonomously.

Delaying Justice(s): A Duration Analysis of Supreme Court Confirmations

Presidents traditionally have had great success when nominating justices to the Supreme Court, with confirmation being the norm and rejection being the rare exception. While the confirmation process usually ends with the nominee taking a seat on the Court, however, there is a great deal of variance in the amount of time it takes the Senate to act. To derive a theoretical explanation of this underlying dynamic in the confirmation process, we draw on a spatial model of presidential nominations to the Court. We then employ a hazard model to test this explanation, using data on all Supreme Court nominations and confirmations since the end of the Civil War. Our primary finding is that the duration of the confirmation process increases as the ideological distance between the president and the Senate increases. We also find evidence that suggests that the duration increases for critical nominees and chief justices and decreases for older nominees, current and previous senators, and nominees with prior experience on state and federal district courts.

Party Differentiation in Congress

At times, the American political parties are so close in terms of policy positions that critics denounce the lack of a “dimes worth of difference” between them. At other times, the gap between them on a left-right dimension is huge. How can we explain this variation? We argue that parties can behave rationally as collective units, and that shifts in divergence and convergence can be explained as rational responses to changes within governmental institutions and to shifts in conditions outside. We analyze this argument using adjusted ADA scores (Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder 1999) to compare voting score differences between the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress from 1952 to 1996. We pose specific hypotheses for potentially important factors shaping party behavior and test them with a multivariate model. Our results support the argument that the variation in the behavioral gap between the two parties in Congress can be explained as rational party responses to internal and external stimuli.

When the smoke clears: expertise, learning and policy diffusion

In federal systems, governments have the opportunity to learn from the policy experiments – and the potential successes – of other governments. Whether they seize such opportunities, however, may depend on the expertise or past experiences of policymakers. Based on an analysis of a dataset on state-level adoptions of youth access antismoking adoptions, we find that states are more likely to emulate other states that have demonstrated the ability to successfully limit youth smoking. In addition, we find that political expertise (as captured by legislative professionalism) and policy expertise (as captured by previous youth access policy experiments at the local level) enhance the likelihood of emulating policy successes found in other states.

Partisanship, Ideology, and Senate Voting on Supreme Court Nominees

It is by now well known that ideological concerns have a major influence on senators votes over Supreme Court nominees. Much less is understood, however, about the effects of partisanship. This study investigates two aspects of partisanship - first, whether confirmation voting has become more partisan over time, even when controlling for other factors, such as ideology; and second, whether partisanship modifies the influence of ideology. The results demonstrate that partisanship has played an increasing role over time and that the effects of ideology are, to some extent, dependent on partisanship.

Measuring gubernatorial budgetary power: A new approach

Numerous scholars have considered the relationship between gubernatorial power and political outcomes. In fact, gubernatorial power has been used as a key explanatory factor in analyses of topics such as gubernatorial approval, divided government, regulation, and even individual political behavior. The key to these studies is the precision with which scholars can measure gubernatorial power and many such studies rely on the Formal Powers Index (FPI)—a measure maintained by Beyle. In this article, we reconsider these commonly used power scores in three parts. First, we argue and show that FPI suffers from a key measurement error that is particularly problematic in analyses of time-series data. Second, we present a new approach to estimating gubernatorial power and explain how this approach deals with the measurement errors in the FPI. Finally, we use our new scores to replicate a study that originally relied on the FPI to analyze the effect of gubernatorial power. Given the prevalence of the FPI in the existing literature, our results have key implications for the study of the effects of gubernatorial power.