Jonathan P. Kastellec

Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees

Does public opinion influence Supreme Court confirmation politics? We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of nine recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We find that greater home-state public support does significantly and strikingly increase the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even controlling for other predictors of roll call voting. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees. We connect this finding to larger debates on the role of majoritarianism and representation.

Racial Diversity and Judicial Influence on Appellate Courts

This paper evaluates the substantive consequences of judicial diversity on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Because of the small percentage of racial minorities on the federal bench, the key question in evaluating these consequences is not whether minority judges simply vote differently from non-minority judges, but whether their presence on appellate courts influences their colleagues and also affects case outcomes. Using matching methods, I show that black judges are significantly more likely than white judges to support affirmative action programs. In fact, the random assignment of a black counter-judge - a black judge sitting with two white judges - to a three-judge panel of the Courts of Appeals nearly ensures that the panel will vote in favor of an affirmative action program. Thus, the substantive consequences of racial diversity on the Courts of Appeals are quite large.

The Statistical Analysis of Judicial Decisions and Legal Rules with Classification Trees

A key question in the quantitative study of legal rules and judicial decision making is the structure of the relationship between case facts and case outcomes. Legal doctrine and legal rules are general attempts to define this relationship. This article summarizes and utilizes a statistical method relatively unexplored in political science and legal scholarship - classification trees - that offers a flexible way to study legal doctrine. I argue that this method, while not replacing traditional statistical tools for studying judicial decisions, can better capture many aspects of the relationship between case facts and case outcomes. To illustrate the methods advantages, I conduct classification tree analyses of search and seizure cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court and confession cases decided by the courts of appeals. These analyses illustrate the ability of classification trees to increase our understanding of legal rules and legal doctrine.

The Interplay of Ideological Diversity, Dissents, and Discretionary Review in the Judicial Hierarchy: Evidence from Death Penalty Cases

We use an original dataset of death penalty decisions on the Courts of Appeals to evaluate how the institutions of multimember appellate courts, dissent, and discretionary higher-court review interact to increase legal consistency in the federal judicial hierarchy. First, beginning with three-judge panels, we show the existence of ideological diversity on a panel—and the potential for dissent—plays a significant role in judicial decision making. Second, because of the relationship between panel composition and panel outcomes, considering only the incidence of dissents dramatically underestimates the influence of the institution of dissent—judges dissent much less frequently than they would in the absence of this relationship. Third, this rarity of dissent means they are informative: when judges do dissent, they influence en banc review in a manner consistent with the preferences of full circuits. Taken together, these results have important implications for assessing legal consistency in a vast and diverse judicial hierarchy.

Voting for Justices: Change and Continuity in Confirmation Voting 1937-2010

The contentiousness of Senate voting on Supreme Court nominations increased dramatically from 1937 to 2010. We identify four potential sources of the increase: (1) changes in the Senate; (2) changes in the nominees; (3) changes in the political environment; and, (4) changes in senators’ evaluative criteria. Using new data and improved statistical techniques, we estimate a well-performing model of senators’ individual voting choices on Supreme Court nominees. Simulations allow an evaluation of the contribution of the four classes of factors to increased contentiousness. The principal source of increased contentiousness was the combination of increasingly extreme nominees and an increasingly polarized Senate. Also significant was the increased mobilization of interest groups. In sum, increased contentiousness seems largely to reflect the ideological polarization of American political elites.

Panel Composition and Voting on the U.S. Courts of Appeals Over Time

This article investigates two issues unexplored in studies of the relationship between panel composition and voting on three-judge panels of the Courts of Appeals: how often will panel composition influence case outcomes, and how has the relationship between panel composition and panel voting changed over time? The author shows that while long stretches of single-party control of the presidency in the first half of the twentieth century often produced a high rate of panels with three judges from the same party, frequent turnover of White House control in the past half century has helped ensure that a majority of panels are composed of at least one judge from each party. The author also presents the first systematic longitudinal analysis of panel composition and judicial behavior, showing that the relationship between the two is a relatively recent phenomenon. These findings have important implications for understanding collegial behavior on the Courts of Appeals.

Predicting and dissecting the seats-votes curve in the 2006 U.S. House election

As the 2006 midterm elections approached, pollsters, scholars, and journalists attempted to predict whether the Democrats would take back the House, Senate, or both. Much media attention was paid to President George W. Bushs declining popularity and the publics dissatisfaction with the Republican-controlled Congress (see e.g., Cook 2006 ). With most attention paid to the immediate political dynamics of the campaign, less noticed (though not entirely neglected) was the fact that the Democrats faced a significant structural disadvantage in their effort to retake both houses of Congress. The Democrats faced an uphill battle to control the Senate simply due to the small number of seats that were seriously contested. Their hurdle to taking over the House was subtler but perhaps just as high: as we show here, they needed to win well over half the vote share in order to have an even chance of winning 50% of the seats, thereby overcoming a structural advantage enjoyed by Republicans leading up to Election Day. We thank Gary Jacobson and Walt Borges for generously sharing their data, Robert Erikson, Eduardo Leoni, Robert Shapiro, David Epstein, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and the National Science Foundation for financial support. Replication datasets and statistical code are available at www.columbia.edu/∼jpk2004/house2006.html .

Race, Context and Judging on the Courts of Appeals: Race-Based Panel Effects in Death Penalty Cases

I examine how the identities of judges on multimember courts interact with case context to influence judicial decision making. Specifically, I leverage variation in panel composition and defendant race to examine race-based panel effects in death penalty cases on the Courts of Appeals. Using a dataset that accounts for several characteristics of a defendant and his crime, I find that the random assignment of a black judge to an otherwise all-nonblack panel substantially increases the probability that the panel will grant relief to a defendant on death row -- but only in cases where the defendant is black. The size of the increase is substantially large: conditional on the defendant being black, a three-judge panel with a single African-American judge is about 25 percentage points more likely to grant relief than an all-nonblack panel. These results have important implications for assessing the role of diversity on the federal courts and contribute to the empirical literature on the application of the death penalty in the United States.

The Politics of Opinion Assignment and Authorship on the US Court of Appeals: Evidence from Sexual Harassment Cases

We evaluate opinion assignment and opinion authorship on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Based on the Courts of Appeals’ distinct institutional setting, we derive theoretical explanations and predictions for opinion assignment on three-judge panels. Using an original dataset of sexual harassment cases, we test our predictions and find that women and more liberal judges are substantially more likely to write opinions in sexual harassment cases, making it likely that these judges have a disproportionate influence on the development of doctrine. We further find that this pattern appears to result not from purely policy-driven behavior by women and liberals assigners, but from an institutional environment in which judges seek out opinions they wish to write. Judicial opinions are the vehicles of judicial policy, and thus these results have important implications for the relationship between legal rules and opinion assignment and for the study of diversity and representation on multimember courts. ∗We thank Deborah Beim, Christina Boyd, Tom Clark, Jeff Lax, Joy Milligan, Laura Moyer, and Kevin Quinn for helpful comments. We also thank Douglas Spencer, Maylin Jue, and Angela Huizi Sun for excellent research assistance.

The Playing Field Shifts: Predicting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2008 U.S. House Elections

The 2008 U.S. House elections mark the first time since 1994 that the Democrats will seek to retain a majority. With the political climate favoring Democrats this year, it seems almost certain that the party will retain control, and will likely increase its share of seats. In five national polls taken in June of this year, Democrats enjoyed on average a 13-point advantage in the generic congressional ballot; as Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien ( 2007 ) point out, these early polls, suitably adjusted, are good predictors of the November vote. As of late July, bettors at intrade.com put the probability of the Democrats retaining a majority at about 95% (Intrade.com 2008 ). Elsewhere in this symposium, Klarner ( 2008 ) predicts an 11-seat gain for the Democrats, while Lockerbie ( 2008 ) forecasts a 25-seat pickup.